Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — HOSPITALS

Psychiatric Hospitals (Nurses)

Mr. Pavitt: asked the Minister of Health what incentives are offered to those in the ward sister-charge nurse grade to serve in psychiatric hospitals rather than in general nursing.

The Minister of Health (Mr. Enoch Powell): All but the most senior nurses on the psychiatric register receive a lead over those on the general register.

Mr. Pavitt: Why has the increased incentive at staff nurse level been retained in the new scale but eliminated at the ward sister-charge nurse level? Is he aware that this £50 decrease is having a very bad effect on recruitment in psychiatric hospitals? Is he further aware that on the female side of psychiatric hospitals there are already acute difficulties because of the shortage of nursing staff?

Mr. Powell: The hon. Member is mistaken. It is only at the very top of

the scale that the lead has been eliminated. This is the result of the award of the Industrial Court, and I gather the view is taken that at the top of the scale there is not a difference in responsibilities.

Almoners

Mr. Boyden: asked the Minister of Health how many almoners and student almoners, respectively, are now employed in the hospital service.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health (Mr. Bernard Braine): One thousand and twenty-two whole-time equivalents last September. The number of students attached to hospitals is not known.

Mr. Boyden: Would not the Joint Parliamentary Secretary agree that the total number is far from adequate and that the rate of increase is deplorable?

Mr. Braine: I would agree that most hospitals would like to recruit more almoners, but I am glad to say that the numbers in post are increasing, though not as rapidly as we would like.

Therapeutic Dietitians

Mr. Boyden: asked the Minister of Health how many therapeutic dietitians and student therapeutic dietitians, respectively, are now employed in the hospital service.

Mr. Braine: One hundred and eighty-two whole-time equivalents last September. The number of students attached to hospitals is not known.

Mr. Boyden: Is not the rate of increase in therapeutic dietitians even worse than the rate of increase in almoners? Do not these figures disclose that a good many general hospitals, probably the majority, have not got anybody devoted to this work?

Mr. Braine: I quite agree. Again, there is a shortage here. Sixty-eight students started training in England and Wales in the autumn of last year: this is some improvement. There are now six institutions in England and Wales running courses to train dietitians. New courses for school leavers have started in recent years at Leeds and Llandaff. I agree that there is a need to recruit still more.

Amenity Beds

Mr. John Hall: asked the Minister of Health how many amenity beds are now available in hospitals in England and Wales; whether this number is likely to be increased; and what action he is taking to draw public attention to the existence of these beds and the conditions under which they can be obtained.

Mr. Powell: Five thousand and twelve at the end of last year; this will depend on demand; the hospital authorities concerned are asked to remind doctors and prospective patients that these beds are available.

Mr. Hall: Is my right hon. Friend aware that many people who would wish to have a private room in a hospital are unaware of the existence of amenity beds and many who are aware of the facility are unable to take advantage of it because there appear to be too few per hospital? Will he take steps to publicise the existence of these beds so that people know about them? If a need is shown, will he then agree to increase the number of amenity beds available?

Mr. Powell: I will certainly consider any application made to me by a hospital authority for an increase in the number of amenity beds. I agree with my hon. Friend that the existence of this facility is in many places insufficiently known, and I have asked hospital authorities to do all they can to make it known. I am informed that a booklet in preparation giving information about the hospital in my hon. Friend's division will include specific reference to this facility.

Mrs. Braddock: Will the Minister be very careful about this matter, because there has been much complaint that people at the moment are able to jump the queue? Waiting lists are very long. Where people can pay extra, they can get into hospital for the treatment they need, whether they need it urgently or not. An increase in the number of amenity beds available will merely increase the possibility of people being able to jump the queue if they are able to pay, thus making waiting lists even longer.

Mr. Powell: No, that cannot arise because amenity beds are available for other patients as and whenever they need them.

Mr. K. Robinson: Since the occupancy rate of amenity beds is substantially higher than that of pay beds, would he consider converting some Section 5 beds into Section 4 beds?

Mr. Powell: Without notice, I am not sure that there is very much difference between the two. There is a big difference between the occupancy for paying patients and the total occupancy.

Consultants (Out-Patients)

Mrs. Slater: asked the Minister of Health what recommendations he has made to hospital authorities on the arrangements at hospitals for National Health patients to see consultants.

Mr. Powell: I am sending the hon. Lady copies of the recommendations.

Mrs. Slater: I thank the Minister for that reply. Does he realise, however, that throughout the country considerable dissatisfaction is being expressed by people about the length of time they often have to wait to see a consultant if they wish to have a consultation through the National Health Service? Is he further aware that these people are saying—and this has a bearing on what was said earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Exchange (Mrs. Braddock) in another context—that if one is prepared to pay one can obtain almost instant treatment? If we are to have a National Health Service, should it not be a comprehensive one rather than a system under which money gives one the first opportunity?

Mr. Powell: Waiting lists for consultation are closely connected with waiting


lists for treatment. I have asked hospital authorities to make the reduction of these lists a major objective this year, and a great deal of work on this is being done.

Management Committees

Mr. Jeger: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware of the opinion of local authorities that they should be entitled to direct representation on the local hospital management committees; and whether he will seek to amend the National Health Service Act, 1946, to this end.

Mr. Powell: Some authorities have expressed this opinion; no, Sir.

Mr. Jeger: Does the Minister not consider that the many years of practical experience of the present system of representation reveals that the time has now arrived for a review to be made of the terms of membership of these committees? Should not local people be entitled to representation on these committees, which are at present rather unbalanced and seem to operate very much in accord with the"old pals act" rather than the National Health Service?

Mr. Powell: There is, in fact, a big representation on these committees of members of local authorities, particularly local health authorities. About one-third of all members of hospital management committees are also members of local authorities. I do not think that direct representation is practicable or right in the case of authorities which are the agents of regional hospital boards.

Royal Berkshire Hospital

Mr. Peter Emery: asked the Minister of Health what extra measures he is taking to speed up the building of the new Royal Berkshire Hospital.

Mr. Powell: Building should start early next year; progress is now satisfactory.

Mr. Emery: Is my right hon. Friend satisfied with the position when the first and second general surgical operating theatres had to close in April because of serious defects in the structure and all the operations had to be carried out in the E.N.T. and gynaecological theatres? Can he not do something to advance the date from 1964 to this year, and will he

do what he can to ensure that Phase 4 of the overall plan is approved in the immediate future?

Mr. Powell: I think we have the earliest practical dates at the moment. I have been aware of the difficulties my hon. Friend mentions and of the great pressure under which this hospital has been working, and I have been personally concerned with the planning at several stages.

Mr. Emery: I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his assistance, but will not he do a little more to see that these dates are brought forward? The staff are doing a superlative job under these conditions, but does my right hon. Friend realise that, though the hospital is still able to get recruits, unless something is done before the early stage of 1964 the position will become critical?

Mr. Powell: I will do everything I can to accelerate the successive stages of these plans, though there is a limit to the extent to which one can reduce the period of time taken in the planning and building of a hospital.

International Hospital Congress

Mr. K. Lewis: asked the Minister of Health how many British delegates attended the thirteenth International Hospital Congress in Paris in June 1963 with expenses paid out of public funds; how many attended with expenses paid out of hospital free money funds; what was the cost both to the Exchequer and to free money funds; and what instructions he has issued for future attendance at this annual congress and other overseas study tours.

Mr. Braine: There were 62 from England and Wales, with expenses met from public or endowment funds; I am sending my hon. Friend a copy of the instructions, and will give him the figures of cost when available.

Mr. Lewis: Is my hon. Friend aware that there has been a suggestion that the Ministry intends to limit the numbers of those who attend these conferences? While no one who is reasonable—and I would count myself as being fairly reasonable in these matters—would want to stop a fair number going to these conferences, does not my hon. Friend think that it becomes ridiculous when it is


open to area boards and management committees to send as many people as they like out of public funds or free money?

Mr. Braine: I am sure we would all agree that my hon. Friend is reasonable in this matter as in everything else. Whilst not in any way discounting what he has said, the figures of attendance this year are not large in relation to the size of the hospital service, and I would not wish it to be thought that we have nothing to learn from or contribute to international meetings. Nevertheless, I am sure that my right hon. Friend will very much bear in mind what my hon. Friend has said.

Mr. K. Robinson: Is the Parliamentary Secretary aware that these congresses and study tours—not one of which, incidentally, I have attended in 12 years' membership of a regional board—are of considerable value to members of hospital authorities? In so far as they offer also a minimal amount of pleasure, is not that some compensation for the enormous amount of voluntary work that these people do, and will the Minister do something to curb his hon. Friend's Scrooge-like propensities?

Mr. Braine: I wholly reject the charge levelled by the hon. Member at my hon. Friend. In matters of this kind a reasonable balance clearly has to be maintained. These conferences are valuable to those who attend, and the exchange of ideas is of great value to all concerned; but this is a matter which has to be watched.

Lindley Hospital, Huddersfield

Mr. J. P. W. Mallalieu: asked the Minister of Health why the buildings included in the initial phase of the new General Hospital at Green Lea, Lindley, Huddersfield, are not, immediately on completion, to be used to relieve the congestion in the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.

Mr. Wade: asked the Minister of Health when the construction of the new hospital at Lindley, Huddersfield, will be completed; when it will be in use, in whole or in part; and what is the cause of the delay.

Mr. Braine: In 1966; the board is considering if part can be brought into

use sooner; the difficulty is that of using premises on which construction work is still proceeding.

Mr. Mallalieu: Will the hon. Gentleman answer the third part of Question No. 5, which is not my Question, namely, what is the cause of the delay? Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the whole of the medical profession in Huddersfield is in favour of using these premises as soon as they are ready and that the situation in the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary is becoming desperate?

Mr. Braine: If when the hon. Gentleman refers to delay he refers to the delay in completing the first phase, that is due to a number of factors—reappraisal during planning, the bad weather in the winter, and so forth. While I fully accept what the hon. Gentleman says about the need to bring these new premises into use as early as possible, I understand that the board has so far been hesitant about this because, with the construction going on in the second phase, the building will not really be suitable for use. However, as I told the hon. Gentleman last week, the board is keeping this aspect under review, and I am sure that what the hon. Gentleman has said in the House will be borne very much in mind.

Huddersfield Royal Infirmary

Mr. J. P. W. Mallalieu: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware that the conditions of work in the old Huddersfield Royal Infirmary are now so bad that existing staff are resigning and new staff are difficult to recruit; and what action he will take to improve conditions.

Mr. Braine: No, Sir; the hospital is being replaced.

Mr. Mallalieu: That is all very well. The hospital is being replaced, but it is 3½ years behind schedule, or something like that. Meantime, as I have said, conditions in the hospital are intolerable. Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that the only possible means of relieving congestion in the hospital is to get a move on with the new general hospital? Will he please do all he can to ensure that?

Mr. Braine: Yes, Sir. I agree entirely.

Royal Gwent and St. Woolas Hospitals

Mr. LI. Williams: asked the Minister of Health how many persons are on the waiting lists in the Royal Gwent and St. Woolas Hospitals, respectively.

Mr. Braine: 2,864 and 413 at the end of March.

Mr. Williams: Can the hon. Gentleman say whether these waiting lists are increasing or decreasing and, if happily the latter, is the decrease fairly substantial?

Mr. Braine: The numbers show some decline since 31st March, 1962. I should add that my right hon. Friend is most anxious that the board should do everything possible in the interim to keep waiting lists down and to reduce the numbers still further.

Mr. LI. Williams: asked the Minister of Health what is the most recent position in regard to the new construction of the Royal Gwent Hospital.

Mr. Braine: The boiler house and workshops are under construction. Tenders for the rest of Phase I have been received.

Mr. Williams: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that as the result of the advent of the vast new steelworks at Llanwern just outside and the construction of other ancillary works in the area it is highly important that the construction of this hospital should be expedited by every means?

Mr. Braine: Yes, Sir. My information at the moment is that the work is expected to start on this part of the scheme in the late summer.

Senior Hospital Medical Officers

Mr. Pavitt: asked the Minister of Health how many senior hospital medical officers are holding consultant posts.

Mr. Braine: Eight hundred and two in England and Wales at 30th September last.

Mr. Pavitt: Is the hon. Gentleman satisfied that these senior hospital medical officers are giving service of full consultant quality?

Mr. Braine: I do not think that I am called upon to pronounce upon the competence of people in the profession.

Mr. Pavitt: The hon. Gentleman has announced that 800 of these people have been graded accordingly. Is he satisfied that, being graded accordingly, they are giving service of consultant quality?

Mr. Braine: If they are doing consultant work they must satisfy the requirements.

Nurses (Pay)

Mr. Sorensen: asked the Minister of Health what representations he has received in respect of charges to hospital nursing staff which have diminished the real value to them of recent salary increases; and what replies he has sent.

Mr. Braine: Nine letters. I am sending the hon. Member copies.

Mr. Sorensen: Does that mean that the hon. Gentleman will also supply me with the information which I have asked for in the Question? Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Question has been put down as a projection of a letter sent to him by a local body in which it makes these allegations? Would the hon. Gentleman say in anticipation of the letter to me whether the increased charges in some cases abolish the value of the increased salaries?

Mr. Braine: The hon. Gentleman might have surmised that the letter would set out the answer in full. What the hon. Gentleman says must be seen against the background of general increases over the last few years and the arbitration in March last. The Industrial Court accepted the view of the management side that an increase in charges was overdue. The outcome was a general increase for qualified staff. This has been accepted by the profession. I do not think that there is anything I can now do about an award by the Industrial Court.

Mr. Sorensen: May I press the hon. Gentleman and ask him whether, in certain cases at least, the increases have been entirely nullified by the increased charges? Would he give me a specific reply?

Mr. Braine: I would not accept what the hon. Gentleman says. The increases


are to some extent offset by the additional provision for remissions; for off-duty absences of 48 hours or high multiples of 24 hours, provided the nurse is absent from the hospital. The extent to which the nurses will benefit from this provision will vary in individual cases.

Mr. Sorensen: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I give notice that I shall raise this matter at the earliest moment on the Adjournment.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF HEALTH

Motor Cars (Hand Control Conversion)

Mrs. Slater: asked the Minister of Health when the grant for hand control conversion costs for motor cars was last fixed.

Mr. Braine: The grant is actual cost, subject to a maximum of £70; it was last fixed in 1954.

Mrs. Slater: In view of the substantially increased charges being made at all garages for this kind of conversion, does the joint Parliamentary Secretary not think that the time has come when there should be a revision of the amount of grant which is made to these disabled people, many of whom are among the poorest section of the community and who rely on a conversion such as this for their livelihood?

Mr. Braine: The charges have not increased by all that amount. In 1954 the cost of a hand control conversion ranged from £30 to £70. It now ranges from £44 to £85. Since below the maximum we pay the actual cost, the grants are not static. However, I will certainly undertake to ask my right hon. Friend to reconsider the limit.

Chiropodists

Mr. Dalyell: asked the Minister of Health what steps he is taking to increase the supply of trained chiropodists.

Mr. Braine: I am not aware that any special steps are called for at present.

Mr. Dalyell: Since much chiropodic disease seemingly unnecessarily immobilises people for relatively trivial reasons, will not the Minister take steps to make

it possible for rather more mature health workers to study chiropody?

Mr. Braine: The whole question of the future of this profession does not rest with my right hon. Friend; this is one of the professions supplementary to medicine. However, I take the hon. Member's point and everything turns on the number of people entering the profession and practising in it. I am glad to say that the number of people who started training during the present academic year is more than twice the figure for four years ago.

Mrs. Slater: Is the Minister aware that there is a tremendous shortage of chiropodists and that my local authority has had the greatest difficulty in appointing a full-time one? Does he not consider that he should consult the Minister of Education on the possibility of encouraging more people to enter what is, I understand, becoming a profession with a four-year training course? Should not young people be encouraged to take up this work, particularly because of its vital importance from the point of view of the care of the aged?

Mr. Braine: I agree with the hon. Lady's remarks generally, and it may be that registration, which is now in process and which will do much, we hope, to raise the status of the profession, will help to maintain and increase the number of young people coming into it.

Prescriptions

Mr. John Hall: asked the Minister of Health why the gross cost per prescription over the years 1960–62 has risen by 20 per cent.

Mr. Powell: Elimination of items obtainable under about 2s.; prescription of larger quantities in chronic cases; increased use of more effective and expensive drugs; rising costs generally.

Mr. K. Robinson: Would the right hon. Gentleman not also care to add as a contributory cost that doctors are prescribing for longer periods in order to offset as far as possible the doubled prescription charge which was introduced at the beginning of this period?

Mr. Powell: I stated that in my answer. I said,"Prescription of larger quantities in chronic cases." I am glad that this is being done. It is to the advantage of the Service as well as the patient.

Cervical Cancer

Dr. Bray: asked the Minister of Health how many women died from cervical cancer in 1961; what proportion of these deaths could have been prevented by earlier detection and treatment; what is the average cost of taking and analysing a smear; and what steps he proposes to take to set up an effective nation-wide detection system.

Mr. K. Robinson: asked the Minister of Health what steps he is taking to encourage routine cervical smear examinations of women aged 25 to 60, and to provide the cytological facilities needed for such a service.

Mr. Proudfoot: asked the Minister of Health if he will set up a scheme for the routine taking of Papanicolaou smears for all women over 20 years of age.

Mr. Fernyhough: asked the Minister of Health if he will provide the necessary financial support to ensure that the work of early diagnosis of cancer in women carried out at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gateshead, will continue uninterrupted.

Mr. Powell: There were 2,504 deaths from cervical cancer in 1961. I cannot estimate how many could have been prevented nor suggest an average cost per smear. Regional boards will consider any requests which committees make to continue or start this procedure. In general, I would refer to my reply of 28th January to the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson).

Dr. Bray: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that where these services are offered more than half the women who are offered them take advantage of them and that the bottleneck occurs in the supply of technicians and pathologists who should be recruited to do the review of the smears taken? Does the Minister not agree that it is his responsibility to see that these pathologists and technicians are trained?

Mr. Powell: I agree that there are limitations on the rate at which this aspect of the Service can be developed. That, no doubt, is one of the reasons why I have been advised that it would be premature at present to aim at a general

application; but I do not doubt that hospital boards will consider applications from hospital committees to go forward with it or to initiate it.

Mr. Robinson: Is the Minister aware that doctors are now regarding cancer of the cervix as a preventable disease, despite the fact that it kills nearly half as many women as there are road deaths in a year? Is he further aware that there has been nearly 100 per cent. co-operation in the very few areas which have undertaken routine smearing and that estimates have been made that the cost of detecting a case is about £60, which is roughly the cost of detecting a case of pulmonary tuberculosis in the mass X-ray scheme? In view of these facts, will he reconsider the earlier and rather unsatisfactory reply he gave me?

Mr. Powell: I would rather not comment on the clinical observations of the hon. Member, but I do not at all underestimate the value and importance of this development; and this is why I say that I am sure that the hospital authorities will give it encouragement where practicable.

Treatment and Research

Dr. Bray: asked the Minister of Health what study is made by Her Majesty's Government, before allocating funds, of the cost and effectiveness of different treatments and of research in relation to the incidence and seriousness of different conditions of ill health.

Mr. Powell: Funds are not allocated for the treatment of particular conditions. The allocation of research funds is a matter for my noble Friend the Minister for Science.

Dr. Bray: Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that he does not consider the incidence of different diseases and the effectiveness of different treatments in the general allocation of funds to the different branches of the hospital service? Was not his reply to the previous Question an indication of a lack of fundamental study in the administration of his Ministry which could prevent many deaths and remove much ill-health?

Mr. Powell: No, Sir. I am sure that it would be quite impracticable to


attempt to allocate sums from the total amount available to hospital authorities either for particular conditions or particular treatments.

Typhoid

Sir A. Hurd: asked the Minister of Health to what causes he attributes recent outbreaks of typhoid.

Mr. Braine: At Harlow the cause is believed to be contaminated food; at South Shields it is not yet known.

Sir A. Hurd: Does the Minister have an expert team of investigators to sift the evidence and discover the causes in order to bring the facts together, so that the public may be warned about the types of food they should avoid and those running food shops should be warned of the precautions they should take?

Mr. Braine: Our officers do, of course, co-operate with the officers of the local health authorities. That co-operation is very close, and I have every reason to believe that it is fully effective.

Mr. Snow: Can the Minister tell us the rate at which typhoid cases are now growing, taking into account all the strains, compared with, say, last year? Further, will he direct his attention to the whole question of the disposal of sewage in built-up areas, bearing in mind that there is some evidence that the building of sewage plants is not running at the same rate as the building of houses?

Mr. Braine: The subject of the latter part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question is not a matter for my Department. I am sure that if he puts down a Question to the appropriate Ministry he will get the answer. As for the first part of his supplementary question, if we exclude the cases traced to the outbreak at Zermatt, the number of cases this year is not abnormal so far. This year 125 cases of typhoid have been notified.

Mr. Snow: asked the Minister of Health what is his estimate of the compensation which will have to be paid by local authorities under Section 41 of the Public Health Act 1961, arising out

of the outbreak of typhoid at Harlow; and how many persons are involved.

Mr. Braine: No estimate is yet possible; ten under this Section and seven under the 1953 Regulations.

Mr. Snow: Can the hon. Gentleman confirm that in fact the compensation will be entirely a charge on the local authorities of the areas where these persons reside and that no finance can be secured either by the individual or by local authorities from National Insurance funds?"

Mr. Braine: Yes, Sir, I think so, but I should explain that the sums involved are not large. I understand, for example, that up to now there have been 13 claims for compensation and £68, as interim payments, has been paid to six persons.

Mr. Snow: asked the Minister of Health what advice is being given to travellers to Switzerland; and what precautions are being taken in respect of visitors from Switzerland, in the light of the experience gained by the Swiss health administration arising out of the outbreak of typhoid at Zermatt and the two further outbreaks.

Mr. Powell: All persons going abroad are advised to be effectively vaccinated against typhoid. None, Sir.

Mr. Snow: But is the right hon. Gentleman aware that since this Question was put down there have been further reports of suspicion about further outbreaks of typhoid in Switzerland? Has the right hon. Gentleman consulted medical opinion on whether there ought not to be special precautions with regard to Switzerland, bearing in mind the very large tourist trade in the summer and the not very good record of the relationship between the Swiss tourist industry and the Swiss health authorities, which were not above suspicion in the case of the Zermatt outbreak?

Mr. Powell: The last point is not for me to comment upon. This is a matter which is constantly looked at by my medical advisers. I am satisfied that the best way to deal with it is through local health authorities, which obtain assistance from my Department in dealing with any cases that occur and in following up the causes as promptly as possible.

Eggs (Pasteurisation)

Sir A. Hard: asked the Minister of Health when he proposes to bring forward regulations to require the pasteurisation to a satisfactory standard of all bulked liquid/whole egg intended for human consumption; and if he has consulted the British Egg Marketing Board and the National Egg Packers' Association on the practicability of enforcing such regulations at an early date while considerable stocks of home-produced liquid egg have to be disposed of and pasteurising facilities are restricted.

Mr. Braine: This month; the operative date is under consideration; yes, Sir.

Sir A. Hurd: I am not quite sure what that reply means. Does it mean that home-produced liquid egg which is now held in stock will no longer be allowed to be sold for human consumption unless it has been subjected to what is now to be the approved pasteurisation process? As there does not seem to be any evidence that trouble has arisen through home-produced supplies of liquid egg, will not the Minister give a period of grace to allow these stocks, which seem to be quite safe, to be disposed of without very heavy loss to the producers?

Mr. Braine: The answer to the last part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question is that the subject is very much in my right hon. Friend's mind. As regards the first part, I was answering the Question on the Order Paper, which asked when my right hon. Friend proposes to bring forward regulations to require pasteurisation to a satisfactory standard and I said that it would be this month. The operative date of the new regulations is still under consideration, but it may be of interest to the House to know, because this has been a matter of some public comment, that, by voluntary arrangement, all whole liquid Chinese egg is already being pasteurised.

Mr. P. Browne: Is it not a fact that, originally, these regulations were to come into force on 1st August? Is it true that they have now been put back to probably 1st January of next year? Is my hon. Friend aware that all those who are involved in the poultry industry would wish these regulations to come in

as soon as possible, because it is undoubtedly the fact that liquid egg has been the cause of illness and outbreaks of various diseases in the past?

Mr. Braine: I will advise my hon. Friend to await the regulations which will be shortly laid before the House.

Clerical Staff

Mr. Fitch: asked the Minister of Health if he intends to recognise the School Certificate as equivalent to the General Certificate of Education for incremental purposes for the clerical grade staff in the National Health Service.

Mr. Braine: My right hon. Friend is awaiting a recommendation on this from the Whitley Council.

Mr. Fitch: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that both the National Coal Board and the Electricity Council regard the School Certificate as equivalent to the General Certificate of Education? Will he pass this information on to the Whitley Council?

Mr. Braine: Yes, Sir. I understand that a Committee of the Council agreed on 18th June to extend this provision to officers in post who possess qualifications corresponding to the School Certificate examination. The joint secretaries are working out the details of the agreement now.

Tuberculosis (Coseley and Sedgley)

Mr. R. Edwards: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware of the high percentage of tuberculosis among school children in the Coseley and Sedgley areas of Staffordshire; what steps are being taken to ascertain the causes of this situation; and what action is being taken to improve it.

Mr. Powell: There has been an outbreak in one school; the source has been discovered; continued supervision of contacts, testing and prophylactic treatment.

Mr. Edwards: Whilst thanking the right hon. Gentleman for that reassuring reply, may I ask whether he will confirm that the main cause of tuberculosis is infected milk? Has the milk supplied to the schools been T.B. tested? Will the right hon. Gentleman agree further that


contributory causes of tuberculosis are excessive smoke fumes and dust from local industry? Is this aspect of the problem being inquired into?

Mr. Powell: There is no reason to relate the source of this particular incident in this school to either of the causes which the hon. Member mentioned. The child who was the source of this infection has been traced, but it is only at this one school that there has been anything abnormal.

Doctors (Pay)

Mr. K. Robinson: asked the Minister of Health what recent discussions he has had with the medical profession regarding alternative methods of reimbursing general practitioners' practice expenses, or any other proposals for changing existing pool arrangements.

Mr. Powell: None, Sir. The present methods were accepted by the Government and the profession in 1960 following the Royal Commission Report. The Review Body recently recommended no change.

Mr. Robinson: Why has the right hon. Gentleman not had discussions? Is he aware that there is increasing evidence of dissatisfaction in the medical profession with the present arrangements? Is it not the right hon. Gentleman's duty at any rate to encourage the introduction of a better system to promote the highest standards of general practice?

Mr. Powell: The method of remuneration of the medical profession is a matter of agreement between the profession and the Government. At present it is covered by the agreement following the Royal Commission's Report, and that was looked at by the Review Body recently. It reported that there should be no change, and this has been accepted by the Government.

Mr. Rankin: Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that when it is first announced that an increase of 14 per cent. is coming to the medical profession, and particularly the general practitioners, and it works out in the end at only 7 per cent., that system of remuneration is something which he ought to look at?

Mr. Powell: It does not work out at anything of the sort. It works out at a 14 per cent. increase in remuneration from public sources.

Oral Answers to Questions — EMPLOYMENT

Bideford and Torrington

Mr. P. Browne: asked the Minister of Labour if he will give the unemployment figure, expressed as a percentage of the insured population, for the Bideford and Torrington Employment Exchange area at the last count; and if he will give the figure for the same month in 1962.

The Minister of Labour (Mr. John Hare): 4 per cent. and 2·2 per cent., respectively.

Mr. Browne: May I first of all say how pleased I am to see my right hon. Friend back with us after his illness and express the hope that he will soon be fully recovered and get rid of his stick?
May I ask my right hon. Friend whether he is aware of the great help that we have had from the manager and staff of the local employment exchange, in particular when the shipyard in my constituency closed down suddenly in March? However, will he not agree that these are shocking figures, and will he consult his right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade to see what steps can be taken to alleviate the situation, bearing in mind that there is a considerable hidden figure of unemployment in the district and the fact that at the time the shipyard closed down quite a lot of men left the district?

Mr. Hare: May I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks in the first part of his supplementary question?
In answer to the last part, as he knows, Bideford has now been listed as a development district. I think he is also aware that the President of the Board of Trade is willing to consider helping any firm which can get the yard going again on a satisfactory commercial basis. I hope that it will be possible for this to be done.

Mr. Lipton: As the right hon. Gentleman appears to know what the insured


population is in this particular employment exchange area, may I ask him why he always refuses to let London Members of Parliament know the insured populations in the area of employment exchanges in London?

Mr. Hare: I think that is an irrelevant supplementary question. I have given the insured population of the Bideford and Torrington Employment Exchange area.

Mr. Jay: Is the Minister aware that Dr. Beeching is proposing to close down the railway to Bideford and Torrington?

Apprentices, The Hartlepools

Commander Kerans: asked the Minister of Labour what proposals he has for completing the training of apprentices who were made redundant in The Hartlepools as a result of the closing of the shipyard and engineering works.

Mr. Hare: Of 155 apprentices who were made redundant, 130 are continuing their training with other employers;14 have entered other employment; and 11 are still registered for work, of whom 7 are under submission to employers. Everything possible is being done to help these apprentices find employment in which they can continue their training.

Commander Kerans: Is my right hon. Friend aware that I am grateful to him for the efforts he has made to decrease the apprentice unemployed? May I ask if he will do what he can to assist me to obtain the C.E.G.B. contract for Richardsons Westgarth who employ a very large number of apprentices?

Mr. Hare: I can certainly promise my hon. and gallant Friend that I will do all I can to find employment for these few boys who still have not got the jobs that I should like to see them have.

Dr. Bray: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the extent to which the apprentices from the Tees-side works which are closing down were moved to other works which subsequently closed down? I she further aware that Stephenson & Hawthorn of Darlington are to close down in December, for example?

Mr. Hare: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will put down a Question on that point.

School-Leavers

Mr. Prentice: asked the Minister of Labour if he will make a statement on the prospects for the summer school-leavers this year for apprenticeship and other forms of occupational training; and what special steps the Government will take to improve these prospects.

Mr. Hare: Provided employers pay proper regard to the needs of an expanding economy there should be no lack of apprenticeship and other training opportunities for summer school leavers. This year's change in school leaving dates, which we have brought to the notice of employers, makes it important that firms should, in their own interests, increase their apprenticeship intake this summer, as there will be far fewer leavers at Christmas than in previous years. They should also do this in order to be in a position to take maximum advantage from the new legislation on industrial training now being prepared to give effect to the proposals in the White Paper (Cmd. 1892) published last December.

Mr. Prentice: May I first of all welcome the Minister back after his illness and express the hope that he will have a speedy recovery?
Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that the situation is particularly serious in that in the first four months of this year there was a heavy drop in the intake of apprentices all over the country compared with last year, and does this not bode ill for the much larger number of school-leavers in the summer? Should there not be an additional campaign by the right hon. Gentleman, the Department and the Industrial Training Council in the next few months to overcome this trend?

Mr. Hare: Last week my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary pointed out that now the economy is expanding this is an excellent opportunity to improve the rather disappointing performance in the early part of the year. I myself, together with the chairman of the Industrial Training Council, am putting pressure, through the Youth Employment Service, on all employers and trade unions to take as vigorous action as possible to implement the need to provide these extra training facilities during the rest of the year.

I.L.O. Conference, Geneva

Mr. Brockway: asked the Minister of Labour if he will make a statement on the circumstances of the withdrawal of the African delegations from the International Labour Office conference at Geneva and the consequences on the functioning of the organisation.

Mr. Prentice: asked the Minister of Labour what action has been taken by the British Government delegation at the current conference of the International Labour Office on the controversies surrounding the attendance of the South African delegation; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Hare: On 12th June, in the I.L.O. Conference in Geneva, a number of African delegates challenged the right of the employers' delegate of South Africa to address the Conference. Subsequently, the officers of the Conference upheld the view of the legal adviser of the Organisation that all properly accredited delegates have the right to speak.
Following the speech of the South African delegate, and after consultations between representatives of the African delegations and the Director-General of the I.L.O., the African delegates announced on 19th June that they had decided to withdraw from the Conference. These questions did not involve the Conference in any vote.
On the separate question of the validation of the credentials of the workers' delegate from South Africa, I would refer to the answer I gave to the hon. Member for Eton and Slough (Mr. Brockway) on 27th June, 1963.

Mr. Brockway: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that that does not bring the story up to date? Is he aware that when the vote was taken on the representation of the South African trade unions, the British workers' delegate voted against this on the ground that no coloured person is allowed to be a member of those trade unions,but that the representatives of the Government and of the employers abstained on that fundamental issue? Can the Minister give us any information about the whole series of votes last Saturday when the I.L.O. considered referring this matter to the United Nations? How did the Government delegate vote then?

Mr. Hare: In answer to the first part of the supplementary question, as I have indicated, the majority report of the Credentials Committee held that the workers' representative from South Africa had been chosen in accordance with the constitution of the I.L.O. but the minority took a different view. It was on this report that this particular vote was taken, and the United Kingdom delegate abstained in view of the very considerable doubt as to whether there had been a failure to follow the constitution. On the other matters, as I think the hon. Gentleman knows, a decision has now been taken for a tripartite delegation to accompany the Director-General of the I.L.O. to see the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Mr. Prentice: Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the stage has now been reached where an increasing number of delegations of employers, workers and Government delegates all over the world are taking the view that the South African policies are incompatible with the Charter of the I.L.O. and, therefore, with continued membership of it, and this view is shared by the Director-General, Mr. Morse? Does not the right hon. Gentleman recognise that we regard the attitude of the British Government as disappointing? Could not they at least have gone as far as the American delegation in denouncing the policy of apartheid, and could the right hon. Gentleman give more information about the votes on Saturday?

Mr. Hare: As I think the House knows, Her Majesty's Government have consistently condemned the policy of apartheid. But the important thing is to deal with South Africa in such a way as to do as little harm as possible to the I.L.O. and it was on this theme that the Director-General addressed his speech to the Conference. It must be our aim to do nothing which will damage the I.L.O.
I was asked why the Government delegate of the United Kingdom Government abstained in this vote on Saturday. The answer is that it would be premature while the question of amending the constitution of the I.L.O. was being considered to exclude South Africa from meetings of the I.L.O.

Mr. Strachey: Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Government


will very soon have to choose whether to stand by the members of the Commonwealth on these issues or to go on with these equivocal votes about South Africa? Ought not Commonwealth interests here to take a very high place in their consideration?

Mr. Hare: I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will agree that as there is a delegation about to go over to see the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and as this matter is likely to be raised in the Security Council, it is really not right for us to try to debate it at this time.

Mr. K. Lewis: Is it not deplorable that an organisation such as the International Labour Office, which does so much good, should be used as a sounding board for this kind of issue which really has nothing to do with it, and would it not be best, in the service of improving relationships between African countries, if South Africa were encouraged to be in this organisation so that it could be influenced in its labour policy within the organisation itself?

Mr. Hare: My hon. Friend will understand when I say that I do not want to be drawn on this in view of the fact that the delegation will shortly be going to New York to see the Secretary-General of the United Nations. On the general point he makes, I think the whole House will agree that it is a pity that the I.L.O.—its record has been, I think, almost unique among international organisations in that politics have played very little part in it—should now find that politics are being drawn into what it is trying to do.

Mr. Brockway: In view of the unsatisfactory replies, I beg to give notice that I shall take the earliest opportunity to raise the matter on the Adjournment.

Thorne

Mr. Jeger: asked the Minister of Labour, in view of the high unemployment rate of 6·6 per cent. in Thorne, which compares with 2·4 per cent. nationally, what special action he proposes to take to find employment in that area for men, women, juveniles and registered disabled who are seeking work.

Mr. Hare: The rate of unemployment has now fallen to 5·8 per cent. compared

with 2·1 per cent. nationally. My officers will continue to do everything to assist those registered with them to find suitable employment.

Mr. Jeger: Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that reply as being the standardised one which he has been giving for a long time past? Will he take special action, in view of the special circumstances in Thorne, where, on his own admission, unemployment is at twice the national rate?

Mr. Hare: I shall do as I have just said. I shall do all I can to help to place as many people as possible. The hon. Gentleman must not, I think, be too gloomy about the prospects. The economy is expanding, and I think that there will be an improvement in the position in his constitutency as well as elsewhere.

Mr. Jeger: I shall try to accept the right hon. Gentleman's advice not to be too gloomy, but how will he persuade my unemployed constituents not to be too gloomy when neither he nor the President of the Board of Trade is doing anything except wait for something to turn up?

Mr. Hare: No, we are not doing that. The Government are taking very considerable action.

Salford

Mr. Frank Allaun: asked the Minister of Labour how many boys and girls are at present unemployed in Salford; how many are expected to leave school in July; and how many school leavers it is expected will be found jobs.

Mr. Hare: On 10th June, 119 boys and girls were registered as unemployed. About 1,000 are expected to leave school in July. The majority should be able to obtain employment without undue difficulty. The youth employment service will do all it can to help them.

Mr. Allaun: Is not this a tragic way for school-leavers to start their industrial life, which may have lasting psychological effects and which might force them into jobs which they do not like? Will the Minister inquire into, and take some action in, the case of one of the biggest engineering firms in Manchester and Salford which has now stopped taking on apprentices altogether?

Mr. Hare: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman does not wish to exaggerate the situation. There is a youth unemployment problem, but a great deal is being done. Of the 533 Easter school-leavers 13 are at present registered for employment. We must continue to make efforts to place the minority who have not yet been placed.
I have noted what the hon. Gentleman has said on the other matter which he raised.

Catering Industry (Foreign Nationals)

Mr. Robert Cooke: asked the Minister of Labour whether he will speed up the procedure of granting work permits for foreign nationals seeking work in the catering industry, particularly during the summer months of maximum activity.

Mr. Hare: These permits are issued as rapidly as possible, subject to completion of the necessary inquiries. In general, I am satisfied that the procedure works smoothly, but, if my hon. Friend has a particular case in mind, perhaps he would let me know so that I can look into it.

Mr. Cooke: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind that, although what he says may be true in some cases, there are others where it takes a very great deal longer? Will he look at a special case in Bristol at the Grand Spa Hotel which has taken six weeks?

Mr. Hare: If my hon. Friend will be good enough to give me particulars, I will certainly look at it.

Mine Workers, County Durham

Mr. Shinwell: asked the Minister of Labour how many mine workers registered for employment at employment exchanges in County Durham at the last available date.

Mr. Hare: At 10th June, 1963, 1,740.

Mr. Shinwell: Is not this a very high figure of unemployed miners, particularly since efforts have been made to transfer unemployed miners to other parts of the coal field and throughout the country? As there appears to be very little hope of these unemployed miners being again employed in the Durham mining industry,

can the Minister offer any prospects at all for their re-employment?

Mr. Hare: I share the right hon. Gentleman's concern about this figure. As he knows, there has been a considerable contraction in the coal mining industry during the past twelve months in Durham. There are about 6,000 fewer men on the books of the National Coal Board than there were a year ago.
The right hon. Gentleman will agree that the Coal Board is doing as good and as humane a job as possible in trying to find alternative employment and dealing with redundancy as decently as may be. On the general question of the balance of men who are left unemployed, the whole of the Government's policy to try to give special treatment to the North-East and to Scotland will, I hope, play its part in finding jobs for them.

Mr. Shinwell: But is not the right hon. Gentleman aware that there has been a great deal of, if I may use the expression,"ballyhoo" by certain individuals and organisations in the North-East about the transfer of unemployed miners to other coalfields? Does not this very large figure of over 1,700 unemployed miners, in the present depressing situation, give the lie to all this talk about the capacity to transfer unemployed miners to others parts of the coalfield?

Mr. Hare: The right hon. Gentleman will not, I am sure, wish to be unfair. The Coal Board has found work for about 3,000 miners in jobs outside Durham. However, he is right that there is left this balance about whom he feels concern. I certainly share his concern.

Mr. Popplewell: Do not these figures, combined with the figures which the Minister gave to the hon. and gallant Member for The Hartlepools (Commander Kerans) and others, indicate how serious is what is now taking place in the North-East? Will he now say, seeing that he referred to it himself, when the House is to be given the special report compiled by the noble Lord on the Government's intentions regarding what is to be done to absorb some of the unemployed in the North-East?

Mr. Hare: All I can say is that the Government are doing a great deal of work on this. Results have already flowed, and there will be further results.

Scotland

Miss Herbison: asked the Minister of Labour what was the ratio of wholly unemployed women to the number of notified unfilled vacancies for women in the London and South-East region and in the Scottish region, respectively, at the latest available date.

Mr. Hare: In June, 1 to 2 and 4 to 1, respectively.

Miss Herbison: These figures ought to give the Minister great concern. What is he doing, in co-operation with the President of the Board of Trade and, perhaps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to ensure that women in Scotland have at least as good a chance of work as women in the South? Or is the right hon. Gentleman like all other Ministers, quite content that Scotland should be denuded of most of its workers to the Midlands and the South?

Mr. Hare: I assure the hon. Lady that neither I nor any of my colleagues are quite content with the employment situation in Scotland. That is why I have reminded the House that special priority treatment is being given not only to Scotland, of course, but to the North-East. It is by these special methods that we hope to ensure that the people of Scotland get a fairer deal than they have now.

Mr. Lawson: asked the Minister of Labour what was the ratio of wholly unemployed girls of under 18 years to the number of notified unfilled vacancies for girls in the London and South-East region and in the Scottish region, respectively, at the latest available date.

Mr. Hare: At the June count, for every 100 wholly unemployed girls there were 720 notified vacancies in the London and South-Eastern region and 90 in Scotland.

Mr. Lawson: Does the Minister think about these figures at all? Does he appreciate how serious is the situation in Scotland? Is he aware that even Government Departments are telling girls in Scotland that there are no jobs for them there and that they must come to London if they want work at all? Will he see that something is done about this very urgent problem in Scotland?

Mr. Hare: I have already expressed to the hon. Lady the Member for Lanarkshire, North (Miss Herbison) my concern on this whole general subject. I think that we can all take some comfort from the fact that we are having considerable success in placing school-leavers. By mid-June, only 3·4 per cent. of the total number of Easter school-leavers were, in fact, registered for employment. To this extent, the picture as it affects young people is better, I think, than some people may realise.

Mr. Ross: The right hon. Gentleman seems to be very complacent. He should not be. Is he aware that a new batch of school-leavers is leaving this week?

Mr. Hare: I am not complacent, and I am well aware of the fact to which the hon. Gentleman has just referred.

PRIVATE NOTICE QUESTIONS

Mr. Callaghan: May I raise a question of order on Private Notice Questions, Mr. Speaker?
As you may know, Sir, I submitted a Private Notice Question for your consideration at one o'clock last Friday, although under your rules it was not considered by you until midday today. At the same time, another Question was put down by a right hon. Member for Oral Answer next Thursday, when, I may say, it will not be reached.
It is stated on page 362 of Erskine May that
A question cannot be asked by private notice in order to anticipate a question of which notice has been given.
I did not put down a Private Notice Question in order to anticipate a Question. I put it down at the same time. I do not know which, by a few minutes, was first It seems to be stretching our rules—I do not say that in any denigratory sense—perhaps I should say that it seems to be a very odd feature of our rules that I should be forestalled in getting an answer on a matter which at least I think is of considerable public importance because a Member, at the same time, puts in a Question for Oral Answer which appears on the Order Paper and of which I can have no knowledge.
I have made some effort to try to contact the Member concerned to see whether he would be willing to allow his


Question to be withdrawn on the ground that this is a matter of very great public importance. It is, in fact, as you know, Mr. Speaker, a bigger deal than was the I.C.I.-Courtaulds deal. Unfortunately, I cannot find the Member and, therefore, cannot get the Question withdrawn.
On 2nd May, 1944, my right hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Mr. Strauss) was allowed to ask a Private Notice Question, even though the other Question had not been withdrawn, on the ground that there was considerable public interest in it and that it concerned a matter of great public importance. It was in connection with negotiations with Spain. In view of the fact that the weekend rather alters arrangements on a matter like this, I wonder whether you, Mr. Speaker, would allow me to ask the Private Notice Question which I submitted to you last Friday and which you considered this morning?

Mr. Speaker: With respect to the hon. Member, the system does not work like that. It is not a question of putting down Private Notice Questions. They can be submitted to the Chair, but the Chair never considers a Private Notice Question for Monday before Monday. The process for getting them in begins at ten o'clock. They are not ruled upon until twelve o'clock, so that it is fair to everybody.
I am sure that the hon. Member will understand that it would not be fair to the right hon. Gentleman in question to allow him, by these exceptional arrangements, to anticipate the Question which he has on the Paper. It would take all the sting and value out of it. For that reason, and although I sympathise with the hon. Member, I do not think that it would be right to do as he suggests. I do not think that it would be fair to the right hon. Member concerned.

Mr. Callaghan: I do not think, Mr. Speaker, that it would take any sting out of the Question, because it will not be answered orally on Thursday. It will receive a Written Answer. We are not pre-empting on anybody else's rights. This is surely a case of being fair all round. It is not only a question of fairness to the Member who put down the Question for answer next Thursday. It is also a question of fairness to a Member who, rightly or wrongly, may believe

that a Question about a deal like this, involving about £500 million of capital, is also of public interest and should receive an Oral Answer.
May I again refer you, Mr. Speaker, to the fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall was allowed to ask such a Question. As there is clearly very great public interest in the Burmah Oil take-over, may I be allowed to ask the Question now by Private Notice so that any subsequent action can follow in the normal way?

Mr. Speaker: I do not think that that would be fair. The hon. Member is under a slight delusion. The Question of the right hon. Member concerned is for answer tomorrow, not Thursday. That gives us a little more time to think about it. I cannot tell what will happen about the Question tomorrow—whether it will be answered in writing or whether leave will be sought to answer it at the end of Question Time. I cannot tell those things. I sympathise with the hon. Gentleman, but I must try to be fair all round and I think that priority in fairness is to the right hon. Member whose Question is on the Order Paper for answer tomorrow. I cannot deviate from that without deviating from fairness.

Mr. Wilkins: May I direct your attention, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House to a letter which I believe all right hon. and hon. Members have received, which applies—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I suspect that the purpose of the hon. Member's remarks relates to Privilege. May I deal with another matter first? We will come to that in due course. Mr. Heath.

Mr. Callaghan: May I ask you this, Mr. Speaker, on business? Would the Chancellor of the Exchequer be willing to make a statement on this matter tomorrow?

Mr. Speaker: We cannot plunge into one matter in the middle of something else.

Later—

Mr. Speaker: I do not know whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer is able to help us.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Reginald Maudling): If it would be of assistance to the House, perhaps the best


arrangement would be that it the Question which is put down to me for Oral Answer tomorrow is not reached, I undertake, with permission, to answer it at the end of Question Time.

Mr. Callaghan: Thank you.

MR. HAROLD PHILBY

The Lord Privy Seal (Mr. Edward Heath): With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I wish to make a statement on the case of Mr. Harold Philby.
I informed the House on 20th March that shortly after the disappearance of Mr. H. A. R. Philby from the Lebanon Mrs. Philby received messages purporting to come from him from Cairo. At the request of his wife and of a British newspaper which he was representing, Her Majesty's Government made inquiries concerning his whereabouts from the Governments in both Cairo and Beirut, without success.
I can now tell the House that more recently Mrs. Philby has received messages purporting to come from Mr. Philby from behind the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya reported on 3rd June that Mr. Philby was with the Imam of the Yemen. There is no confirmation of this story.
Although there is as yet no certainty concerning Mr. Philby's whereabouts, there has been a development which may throw light on the question. On 7th November, 1955, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, at that time Foreign Secretary, told the House that it had become known that Mr. Philby had had Communist associations and that he was asked to resign from the Foreign Service in July, 1951, which he did. My right hon. Friend also said that his case had been the subject of close investigation and that no evidence had been found up to that time to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess and Maclean or that he had betrayed the interests of this country.
My right hon. Friend added that inquiries were continuing. In fact, the security services have never closed their file on this case and now have further information. They are now aware, partly as a result of an admission by Mr. Philby himself, that he worked for

the Soviet authorities before 1946 and that in 1951 he in fact warned Maclean through Burgess that the security services were about to take action against him.
This information, coupled with the latest messages received by Mrs. Philby, suggests that when he left Beirut he may have gone to one of the countries of the Soviet bloc.
Since Mr. Philby resigned from the Foreign Service in July, 1951, he has not had access of any kind to any official information. For the last seven years he has been living outside British legal jurisdiction.

Mr. Gordon Walker: I thank the Lord Privy Seal for taking this opportunity to put the record straight. He said in his statement that it was"partly" as a result of an admission by Mr. Philby that this new information became available. Could the right hon. Gentleman say to whom this admission was made and in what circumstances? Since the right hon. Gentleman said that it was"partly" as a result of an admission by Mr. Philby, there must have been other evidence. Could that evidence have been known if the matter had been more diligently pursued in 1955, when the Prime Minister made his statement?
Could the Lord Privy Seal tell us how an employee in the Foreign Office was able to know the intentions of the security services? This seems to me a matter of very great importance. Could the right hon. Gentleman tell us a little more about the Government's ideas as to the whereabouts of Mr. Philby? Surely it is inconceivable that he can be with the Imam if he has been working for Russia before and since 1946. If he is in the Yemen, and on the other side with the Government, can the right hon. Gentleman say whether he is having anything to do with the fate of our soldiers now in the Yemen?

Mr. Heath: We have, naturally, tried to secure confirmation of the report that he was with the Imam. There have been a number of statements or rumours of this kind, but, as I said in my statement, we have not been able to obtain confirmation.
As to the evidence, I have said that the security services have never closed their files on this matter and, therefore,


over this long period of twelve years, they have continued with persistence to endeavour to find the truth about this matter. From time to time, they have been able to obtain items of information and finally, as I have said, there was, in part, the admission of Mr. Philby himself.

Mr. Gordon Walker: To the security services?

Mr. Heath: I did not say that.

Mr. Gordon Walker: To whom?

Mr. Heath: I am not prepared, nor would it be right, to give information about the way this information was finally brought together. That, however, is the conclusion we have reached.
As to Mr. Philby's activities in the Foreign Service, he was a temporary First Secretary up to July, 1951, in the Foreign Service and in that capacity, as has already been stated, he had knowledge of certain information which he was then able, we now know, to pass to Burgess and Maclean.

Mr. Gordon Walker: Can the right hon. Gentleman answer my other question, whether, in 1955, if the matter had been more diligently pursued, the other evidence that is now apparently available could have been discovered?

Mr. Heath: No, Sir; I do not think it could have been discovered. The inquiries made at that time were extensive and intensive and I do not believe that at that particular moment it was possible to come to any other conclusion than my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, as Foreign Secretary, announced to the House in the debate.

Mr. Lipton: Does the Lord Privy Seal's statement mean that Mr. Philby was, in fact, the"third man" that we were talking about at the time of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean?

Mr. Heath: Yes, Sir.

COMPLAINT OF PRIVILEGE

Mr. Wilkins: I wish to raise with you, Mr. Speaker, a matter which, I believe, constitutes a breach of Privilege.
I believe that all right hon. and hon. Members of the House have received

over the weekend a circular letter which is headed"Textile Action Group" and is sent from 9–11, Higher Church St. Blackburn, and dated 22nd June, 1963. It reads thus:
To all Members of Parliament. Hon. Members, The last debate on the textile industry was badly attended by Members of Parliament until the vote. On 1st July, 1963"—
that is today—
the Textile Action Group will be at the House and will be vary pleased to publish the names of Members who attend that day so that their constituents will be able to assess the interest shown.
Yours faithfully,
R. Cocks, Hon. Secretary.
I am not, of course, a representative of a constituency where textiles are a dominant industry, but I submit that this is highly offensive to right hon. and hon. Members who endeavour to attend this House regularly and who faithfully perform their duties on behalf of their constituents and the country. It is not possible for a right hon. or hon. Member always to be in his place in the House. Indeed, this will be, possibly, the situation today, as we deal with various subjects in which hon. Members are interested.
I submit, Mr. Speaker, that this is either an obvious or an implied threat to Members of the House and I ask you to be so kind as to rule whether this constitutes prima facie a breach of Privilege of the House.

Mr. Speaker: Will the hon. Member be good enough to give me his copy of the letter?

Copy of letter handed in.

Mr. Speaker: I will consider the hon. Member's complaint and rule upon it tomorrow.

THE YEMEN (BRITISH SERVICE PERSONNEL)

Mr. Sorensen: Is it possible, Mr. Speaker, for the Government to make a statement about the continued detention of British troops in the Yemen? Are the Government desirous of doing so?

Mr. Speaker: Order. We cannot have a general discussion about something of which we have not had notice. Otherwise, all kinds of suggestions would crop up.

ROYAL DOCKYARDS (ESTIMATES COMMITTEE'S REPORTS)

3.45 p.m.

Mr. James MacColl (Widnes): I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the Ninth Report from the Estimates Committee in the last Session of Parliament and of the Fifth Special Report from the Estimates Committee relating to Her Majesty's Dockyards.
The subject which we are to consider in the first half of today's sitting ranks well among the various subjects which the Estimates Committee has invited the House to consider. Hon. Members will remember that the normal procedure in these matters is that a Sub-Committee of the Estimates Committee hears the evidence, from which it drafts a report, which is subsequently considered, amended and approved by the full Estimates Committee and is then presented to the House and published. Then, at a later date, the Department or Departments concerned in the recommendations of the Estimates Committee give their replies to the recommendations which have been made.
I am well aware that the subject of dockyards has implications which go a good deal wider than the recommendations with which the Estimates Committee is concerned. That is in the nature of things, because it is a Committee which cannot consider matters of policy and is directed entirely to securing economies and efficiency and not to more general problems of the nature of dockyards and the part which they should play.
Nevertheless, what the Estimates Committee can and normally does do is to offer the House the facts upon which a judgment can be made. It is a service of which hon. Members who are busy and have varying interests can well make use that we get in an Estimates Committee Report, not only the Report and recommendations, but also the evidence upon which those recommendations are based. Therefore, it is a good exercise in discipline for the Estimates Committee to curb its enthusiasm or its prejudices, whatever the case may be, and to keep strictly to the facts as published in the recorded evidence.
The dockyards—and I speak as one who knew nothing about them until I

turned to study the subject in the Sub-Committee—are a fascinating subject. I do not think that many hon. Members appreciate how large they are. Our dockyard system employs about 40,000 people and has a rate of expenditure of about £60 million. It is, therefore, a big subject and involves a big slice of the national purse. It is also, owing to the nature of the siting of the dockyards, a big human problem from the point of view of their effect upon the economy of the areas in which the dockyards are to be found.
Although, in our Report, the Sub-Committee looked primarily at certain managerial points, they were not merely an academic exercise, because upon the solution of the managerial problems and the problems of efficiency depends the possibility of having in the dockyards a system which can keep up with the growing development of needs. Therefore, I make no apology for taking the time of the House in examining some of the problems which presented themselves not only to us, but to a previous Estimates Committee.
I went on to the Estimates Committee a good many years ago, just after the Sub-Committee under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) had been examining the dockyards. I was brought up by my hon. Friend to look upon that as the ultimate horror in Estimates Committee investigations. I was taught,"However much you grumble about the difficulty of this inquiry, it is nothing compared with what we went through on the subject of dockyards."
What happened—and I should like to tell the House what happened—was that in the 1951 Session the Eighth and Ninth Reports of the Estimates Committee were published with their recommendations, to which I shall return in a moment; nothing was heard from the Admiralty; as the months passed a number of Questions were asked, but no reply was given giving any indication of what was happening. Then my hon. Friend raised the matter on the Navy Estimates in 1952. He got a noncommittal reply that the Admiralty was still thinking. In February, 1953, the replies came from the Admiralty to the Estimates Committee, and in March, 1953, just a month later,


they were debated in the House on an Amendment moved by the late Mr. Ronald Williams, who was then the Member for Wigan.
I therefore think that the House cannot be accused of having been dilatory. It is sometimes said that politicians are slow and hold things up. I think that it can be shown that the House then dealt fairly quickly with the replies when it got them. Now there has been some improvement, because the Ninth Report to which I am speaking was fashioned in July, 1962, and the replies were received in January, 1963, and are being debated now, just a year after we completed our Report. So at least one can say about the Admiralty that it can now turn down a recommendation of the Estimates Committee in much shorter time than it took to do it ten years ago.
There were two important recommendations which were put up by the original Committee in 1951. One was a proposal that there should be a special personnel department in each dockyard, made up of people specially qualified in that field. That was rejected by the Admiralty. By the time we arrived to make our inquiry, it had been accepted.
The next proposal, which was of great importance, was that there should be in each dockyard a general manager. The position under the old-fashioned organisation, which still exists in some of the dockyards, was that there were three main departments which, under the old system, were almost entirely autonomous. There were a constructional, a mechanical engineering, and an electrical engineering department. Each had its separate departmental manager, presided over by an admiral superintendent who, in the nature of things, was not an expert; he may have been an engineer, he may not; but he was there a comparatively short time; and the job was clearly not one of practical co-ordination of any kind. Therefore, a proposal was made by the Estimates Committee to have in each dockyard a general manager coordinating the whole operation.
That, as I say, was turned down by the Admiralty, and turned down in somewhat peremptory words. I do not want to read the whole of the long reply from the Admiralty, but it said that it had considered it with special care and turned

it down because it would be difficult to impose on top of the departmental structure, and that
In short, the concept of a General Manager could not be relied upon to function smoothly in practice unless the existing Departmental structure of the Yard were fundamentally altered, and even then there would be no certainty that the major upheaval which would be involved would necessarily produce a better result.
All that was considered in the debate on the Amendment moved by Mr. Williams.
My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton made a number of interesting contributions, but there was one interesting comment which, I think, is particularly worth referring to. He took up the very point which had been made, that a general manager could not be set up without a fundamental reorganisation of the dockyard structure. He said this on 16th March, 1953, ten years ago:
I know that, in 1945, the American Department of the Navy set up an industrial engineering department…and they had an inquiry made into the management of naval shipyards. They have not got these very specialised functional departmental organisations. Their shipyards are under a shipyard commander, with two operational departments—a planning officer and a production officer with their specialist branches…I suggest that if we have not already done so, we might have a look at this system and find out whether there is anything in it to be recommended."—[Official Report, 16th March, 1953; Vol. 512, c. 1923.]
The Civil Lord of the Admiralty of the time, the hon. Member for Dorset, West (Mr. Wingfield Digby), laughed the whole thing off. He rather poked fun, and regretted that my hon. Friend had turned this debate into rather a technical one on the"narrow issue of management", as he called it. He then gave a rather unpleasant quotation from an evening newspaper about my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton:
He embodies the managerial revolution in action; he is the planner, the middle class intellectual. Men of his type are, I think, the loneliest men usually in the House of Commons; when they are right nobody loves them for it; when they are wrong every traditionalist…turns and rends them."—[Official Report, 16th March, 1953;Vol. 512, c. 1954.]
That was in 1953. In 1955 or thereabouts the Admiralty sent a working party to America. They came back, held a series of conferences about reorganisation, and, by 1958, they decided


to do precisely what my hon. Friend had suggested, and they launched upon the most complicated and difficult operation of fundamental reorganisation, the very kind of reorganisation the Admiralty had sneered at in 1953.
My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton has got something with which he can be very satisfied. He and the present Lord Champion, his predecessor in the chairmanship of the Sub-Committee, and the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Sir S. Summers) are the only Members I know who were members of that Sub-Committee.
I mention this really for three reasons. The first is that I think the House owes it to my hon. Friend to recognise that he and his Committee were fundamentally right, and that he was personally and individually right in 1953 in that debate, in spite of the sneers; and I should like to say to my hon. Friend that he was right and that I love him for it, in spite of what the hon. Member for Dorset, West had to say about him.
We ought to recognise in this House that the habit of pouring cold water on Estimates Committee Reports on the ground that they are the product of wishy-washy thinking by people who do not know much about the subject will not do. Eventually, the Committee's recommendations were accepted.
It is true that the Permanent Secretary, as one might expect, extended the soft answer. He said, in reply to Question 139, that eventually the Admiralty saw the light. I am not rubbing this in, but I mention it. My second reason for doing so is that there is a danger of the Admiralty making the same mistake again. It is very important to recognise that not only was the Sub-Committee then right, but it is very likely that it may be right in some of the matters which are still outstanding. Therefore, I shall go through some of the replies in the present Report. I do not want to go through all of them, because they axe there for hon. Members to read.
The first on which I comment is the reply to Recommendation No. 3. We recommended that qualified men from outside the dockyard service or the naval service should be appointed to senior professional posts in the dockyards. The reply rejected that. It said:

The Admiralty believe that managers of the requisite quality should be found within its ranks. If this incentive is denied, then the quality of the whole body would be likely to suffer in the long run.
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of our recommendation. We were told that reorganisation was being held up because of the shortage of people in senior supervisory posts. We were told that recruitment at the lower levels of young entrants in the professional grades was fairly satisfactory, but the difficulty was to increase the rate of reorganisation without taking more people. If there are reserves of people in the service there is no need for having them from outside, but similarly, there ought to be an increased tempo of reorganisation.
If, on the other hand, reorganisation is held up for lack of supervisory staff, it is no answer to say that this will hold up promotion, because there will be more places for people to go to and more prospect of promotion. I thought that a complete misunderstanding of our argument. It seemed to show that our Report had not been read, because anyone reading our Report could not have failed to get the point, which was put quite clearly.
The next point to which I draw attention is the question of period of service. To strengthen the management team, managers and deputy managers in the home dockyards should normally hold these appointments for periods of five, and preferably, seven years for a particular dockyard. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton will recognise those words. They are taken practically verbatim from his recommendation which was adopted, but in the ten years between his Report and our Report, of 30 departmental managers only four have served for five years and more.
It is no use simply saying that the House and the Admiralty accepted the recommendation, for they have failed to carry it out. This is not a point in isolation. It is something which has been coming up again and again in Reports from the Estimates Committee. When we have some department staffed partly by the Service and partly by civilians the great difficulty is how to get the Service people to stay long enough in the job to carry it out competently. There have been various reports in which the


question of promotion has been mentioned. It was mentioned in two Estimates Committee Reports. Mention was made of staff at Admiralty headquarters. It was also mentioned by the Zuckerman Report on research and also in the Report on the War Office.
If I may interpose"a commercial", I draw the attention of the House to the Report on the Ordnance Survey which came out last week, in which there is precisely the same matter arising in a different field. This is the thread running through the administration whenever the problem arises of the need for longer tours of duty. The dockyards are a highly complicated and technical engineering operation. They are not a sort of frill to the seagoing part of the Navy. As a result of the growth of the technicalities of naval operations they become more and more complicated and difficult as they spread into the difficult fields of radar, nuclear energy, and so on. We cannot play about with these things. For this sort of work we must have the best people we can train. They must have intensive training and devote a substantial part of their lives to it. This is not a point which can be safely ignored, but it is one on which so far the Admiralty seem to have failed in solving the problem.
Another point which arose was about the chain of command. This was not a recommendation, but it was a point which caused us a certain amount of concern and we asked the Admiralty to look at it. As we get more and more complicated administration we get a more complicated administrative hierarchy. I am not an expert on these matters, but I wonder whether this is right. We start with the Third Sea Lord and go down to the Fourth Sea Lord, then to the Director, Dockyards and Maintenance, then to the Director of Dockyards, then to the Admiral Superintendent, then to the General Manager and finally to the Departmental Manager. That seems to be an unwieldy hierarchy. I hope that we shall be told something about the latest thinking on that.
I wish to say a word about the admiral superintendent, because this is another point on which I read the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton with a great deal of in-

terest. This is what he said on 16th March, 1953:
I am expressing a personal opinion and I agree that the Committee…did not say that the Admiral Superintendent should be superseded by a general manager. I am not recommending that now. It is a matter of great difficulty, but there must be under him or with him, as the Committee recommended, a civilian general manager trained in and remaining in the service. As long as naval officers are appointed to some of these positions it will be very difficult for there to be long-term service in these posts."—[Official Report, 16th March, 1953; Vol. 521, c. 1926.]
My hon. Friend did not get his Sub-Committee to go with him. I was in exactly the same position; I did not get my Sub-Committee to go with me. That is perfectly natural. It is part of the discipline of producing a Report from a number of people who have considered something that one does not get one's own way and there is no reason why one should. I only mention this now to show that, with an interval of ten years between, the experience of my hon. Friend and myself has been the same.
We said that it would raise a difficult situation. A general manager must be extremely high-powered; he cannot do a job like this unless he is. He must be at the very top of his profession. Is it always possible to get him to work easily with an admiral superintendent who has precisely the same parish? In this narrow range, are they going to tread on each other's toes? I do not know, but this is a matter which should be looked at.

Mr. David Webster: As, at the same time, the recommendations, which the hon. Member very much led, were to break down the strictly professional barriers and come to the functional, is it not non-logical at the top level to go back to professionalism and split the two levels?

Mr. MacColl: I am merely saying that we should examine the problem of the relationship of the two. The fundamental point of my difficulty is this. There is no doubt that there has been a very happy and long tradition in the naval dockyards of civilians and Admiralty people working happily together. We all accept that and I suppose it is a romantic position.

Mr. F. A. Burden: This is very important. Reorganisation on


these lines has taken place at Chatham and there has been an opportunity of studying it in operation. While, as always in life, one may get clashes of personalities between different managers and different admiral superintendents, it is a fact that so far at Chatham the scheme has worked remarkably well and there is a very happy relationship.

Mr. MacColl: We saw Chatham and the people concerned, and I confirm what the hon. Member has said. My only footnote in qualification is that when one is starting a new experiment one picks, first, one's outstanding people. One says,"Here is a tricky job. Therefore, we must get the sort of people who will rise to the challenge." They do rise to the challenge. They understand that it is a big experiment and they want to make it a success, and there is a tremendous will to make it work. But if one spreads the system to cover all dockyards—which is what I want to see—then it is arguable whether one will always be able to do this.
Before I was interrupted I was about to make the comment that if the technical efficiency of the dockyard is maintained and developed with highly trained professional people, there may be a difficulty. There will be the man who started as an apprentice in the dockyard at the age of 16, who has worked his way right through and is saturated with dockyard loyalty and is, therefore, used to the atmosphere of the dockyard; and if we are to make the dockyards technically efficient we may have to bring in civilians who will not accept that kind of position. That is what worries me, although as I have said, it worries me more than it worries the Committee.
The next recommendation is that more use should be made of the Administrative Staff College at Henley. That was taken from the recommendation of my hon. Friend's Committee. It may seem rather a small thing to include in a recommendation, but the point is that because of their size the dockyards tend to be rather inbred. They do not have very much outside contact. There are very few similar organisations doing work of the same sort, and they are, therefore, inclined to think of themselves as quite separate. No amount of in-service training can substitute for the kind of stimulation obtained through meeting outside

people, possibly in quite different walks of life, who are looking at the same kind of problem.
I think that the contribution which the Administrative Staff College makes is that it brings together people from outside industry and from public services, from private industry and nationalised industries, to look communally at a problem, to look at each other's problems and to learn from each other. This is precisely the kind of training and preparation for senior positions which ought to be available to the dockyard people.
We found that although my hon. Friend's Committee made this recommendation, nobody had gone to the Staff College. The reply given to the recommendation was that
The Dockyard Division will continue to nominate officers whenever possible for acceptance as students at the Administrative Staff College at Henley, but the places for Civil Servants are limited and final selection is in the hands of the College authorities." My information is that the Administrative Staff College had had no applications from the Admiralty and had turned no one down but that after the publication of this Report it had received an application for a place, although this had not yet been taken up because it is in the future.
I want to make it clear to the Admiralty that it is just as important for key men in this kind of industrial work to have the very best administrative training available as it is in the Administrative Civil Service for those who will take higher positions in the main Department. They should not just get what is left after the Administrative Department have picked all the places. This is a matter on which I hope we shall be told what is happening and why more has not been done.

The Civil Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. John Hay): I promise the hon. Member that I will not persist in interrupting him as he goes through the recommendations, because I hope to say something about them later, but I think that I should put the position in this matter in perspective. The hon. Member mentioned the reply which we gave to Recommendation No. 7, but he did not point out that a number of senior and other officers from the dockyards had been on a large number of other courses at institutions other than the Administrative Staff College.

Mr. W. A. Wilkins: From which document are these quotations being made?

Mr. E. G. Willis: From the Observations of the Admiralty.

Mr. MacColl: Our impression on the whole was that the emphasis had been on in-service training and taking people on visits to see operations going on in other comparable industries. That is of little use. What is wanted is a group of keen ambitious men meeting informally round a table and sharing each other's ideas, arguing until the middle of the night and in this way stimulating each other. We do not want to stage a conducted tour around I.C.I. laboratories or something like that. I do not want to press the claims of Henley too far; my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton and I have no shares in Henley. I am making the point simply because it was a recommendation of my hon. Friend's Committee and apparently nothing has been done about it for ten years.

Mr. Webster: I draw attention to Question 168, in which the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr MacColl) said:
You were discussing whether they had been to Ashridge or not. It might be helpful to know what Ashridge is.
Mr. Smithers said:
It is a management training college. We have been to Ashridge, but only to take our own managers there for our own conferences…
I do not consider that that is mixing with other people.

Mr. MacColl: I do not want to delay the House, but I wish to discuss one other recommendation and that is the general problem of methods study and efficiency. We recommended that a
working party should be set up to make a survey…of the use of the more expensive machinery in the Dockyards
and to see whether it should be disposed of or written off when it became obsolete. This working party would consider these highly technical problems and, in particular, would look at the recommendations of the Patton Report. The Admiralty turned that down because it said that it thought that these objects could be
achieved by normal administrative processes without the necessity of setting up a special working party.

That sounds a little too much like some of the other things we have had mentioned before, and it means that nothing very much has happened. I do not say that we are wedded to the idea of a working party, but I should like to know what has been going on in that respect and what steps are being taken to intensify the study of these problems.
This is a Motion to take note of the Report and not a Motion inviting a decision on any matter. We believe that in our Report we made a constructive contribution to the examination of these problems and we offer to the House the evidence upon which our recommendations were placed; they were not just wild generalisations but were based on evidence. I finish with the remark which I made earlier which is that on a solution of these problems and the development in the dockyards of the highest level of efficiency depends the future of the dockyards in competition with other organisations which are likely to work in this field.
The dockyards have to be modern and have to be fully equipped and managed with the utmost efficiency. There is no room in the modern atomic age for anything less or for anything which is merely traditional and pleasantly old-fashioned. That may be a pleasant facade, but behind it there must be 100 per cent. efficiency.

4.20 p.m.

Mr. David Webster: First, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) for the way in which he conducted the Sub-Committee stage of this inquiry. I found it most instructive, and enjoyed"sitting at his feet"—if that is the correct expression to describe someone sitting on his right hand side.
I welcome my hon. Friend the Civil Lord to this Department. When we were investigating the Admiralty dockyards in the afternoons under the chairmanship of the hon. Gentleman, I seemed to be spending most of my mornings with the Civil Lord when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and playing a very large part in conducting the highly controversial and complex Transport Bill through the House. So I am glad to meet them both this afternoon.
The point of departure relates to the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu), with whom I seem to have been spending rather a time on the other side of the world recently, in Australia. One of his recommendations was that there should be a senior personnel officer responsible to the admiral superintendent in every dockyard. That recommendation, after eighteen months, was dropped like a very hot potato by the Admiralty.
The second recommendation was that a general manager should be appointed to every dockyard, and, after an equal length of time, that was also fairly abruptly rejected by the Admiralty. We were sorry about that, though we appreciated the logic of the argument that a general manager is not a viable appointment so long as one has the departments of each dockyard divided on a professional rather than a functional basis.
It was interesting that it took two events, the Report of the Nihill Committee and the visit of a working party to the United States Navy to see how it was arranging its dockyard affairs, before it was announced that the change to general manager structure and to a functional rather than a professional structure would take place and would start in 1958. I think that the original date of completion of such a structure was advertised for 1965. Like many other dates of completion, this has now been postponed, to 1968, and I do not think it would be exceedingly cynical of me if I were to suspect that it would not be completed by that time. I have very strong reasons for suspecting that.
I was rather regretful that the Admiralty, having first turned down these recommendations, should then be, I thought, somewhat reluctant to meet the Estimates Committee again. I feel most strongly that it would be valuable if the Estimates Committee met it again on this subject in the not too far distant future, because we were able to make certain recommendations based upon the original recommendations which our predecessors made and which were turned down. As we see the developing picture, we have certain comments to make.
We also have, not only in the context of that change, considerable recommendations to make, because it is almost impos-

sible in a non-commercial undertaking of such vastness to make an adequate yardstick of efficiency. This is also in the Ordnance Survey Report that we are now working on. In the Admiralty dockyards, where one does not get the consideration of the market place, it is practically impossible to obtain this. We get the well-informed guesses of people who have studied this matter most thoroughly, but it is exceedingly difficult to come to an efficient yardstick of productivity and progress. For that reason I entirely support the first recommendation, that we should have a quinquennial review. I very much hope that the review will be as near quinquennial as possible. It is most important that these things should be looked at very closely with an outside eye.
There is also, coming to the lack of commercial stimulus or probe, however one wishes to describe it, the matter of the purchasing of new machinery, and the costing and the O. & M. study which is necessary before this is done. I appreciate that devoted people from the Treasury do this, but I was a little unhappy regarding the vulgar commercialism which seems to be lacking in the Admiralty organisation. I think that that also applied to the redundant equipment, of which there is a considerable amount. It is not only equipment and machinery, but work buildings and office buildings which are not particularly efficient, though they were probably very effective at the time of Nelson. A new block is being provided at Rosyth. We welcome that. We think that it will make a great deal of improvement.
We had also to consider the disposal by the Navy of very considerable acreages—in fact, square miles—of dockyard land which has become either redundant or no longer necessary to our Commonwealth commitment. Some of it, as in South Africa, has been disposed of to the Government concerned. My particular concern was the disposal of the Sheerness docks. In Question No. 3 I showed my unhappiness about this, and asked what valuation was made of the property before it was disposed of. As I understand the answer, it was that no great valuation was made and there was no great call for it, and that it was simply a matter of getting the highest bidder. But the highest bidder turned out to be a


property development company. I am not satisfied that the taxpayer's money was adequately protected before it was sold by ascertaining the value of the dock in the hands of a commercial developer.
This is something which is not simply a matter which would concern the Admiralty and its dockyards. Quite an acreage will, I suspect, become redundant in the future, and I would hope that adequate valuation will be made. Many of these areas are in the hearts of great cities. What takes place before they are disposed of? I would cite the situation within the railways. The right to develop such property has now been obtained for the Railways Board and Railway Sites Limited. I am very much an admirer of private enterprise, but I am very insistent that when the State disposes of vast properties an adequate valuation should be made so that nobody makes a killing at the expense of the taxpayer.
Another matter over which I have been a little uncertain about whether there is the necessary commercial stimulus within the Admiralty concerns apprentices. In paragraph 25 of our Report it is stated that, in 1955, 1,000 apprentices were taken on on a five-year training course at a cost to the taxpayer of £1·7 million. It is also stated that in an average year half or more than half the apprentices leave for dockyard service. If half of the 1,000 left within two years of completing their apprenticeship, that would be a loss to the State of £850,000, with no immediate return. I do not grudge this if this is an overt decision about the education of apprentices taken as such. I do grudge it if it is a decision arrived at in an absent-minded manner, although it is to be something from which industry in general will benefit at the expense of the taxpayer.
I would say that it is essential that the advertising and the catchment area for this type of training should not just be in the ports themselves and that we should have a national form of advertising with a national form of entry, and that we should be more selective in respect of the type of person undertaking this most excellent form of training. I would not necessarily insert a qualifying clause that they should stay in the Admiralty service, but if this is to be an overt decision to train our young men in

skills valuable to industry nationally, let us do it on a more selective and more widely-spread basis. I am certain that the Civil Lord will say that many private industrial firms do exactly the same thing, but I am certain that they do it as an overt decision either from a sense of duty or else because they feel that it pays the industry and the company concerned.
I come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Widnes about the training at Henley. I am certain that the Civil Lord will do everything he can as the hon. Member for Henley to encourage recruiting there and also at Ashridge. I was a little dissatisfied with the answer of the Admiralty about sending these people to the courses when it was stated in the evidence, in reply to the Question which I quoted, that they simply went as an exclusive group taken there by the Admiralty for a weekend or a fortnight to meet only Admiralty personnel. I feel that if this had been done on a wider basis a great deal of benefit could have been gained both by Admiralty senior management and by the senior management of private industry.
I also suspect that the recommendations of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Edmonton and his Sub-Committee would not have met the same abrupt response from the Admiralty had there been closer liaison between those bodies. After all, the turn from a professional to a functional basis is almost, in effect, the breakdown of a demarcation dispute, and to put it on to a functional basis is a sounder thing and something about which many people in private industry are very concerned.
Another thing that concerns me very much in the development of this functional basis was that I think that they would have seen at Ashridge and Henley that this change to functionalism would have required greater recruiting into the senior management ranks. I am also surprised that the experience at Chatham was not shown up more rapidly than it was, that the next major dockyard should be modernised and functionalised, which is Rosyth, because at Rosyth it was definitely said that changing to a functional basis was held up because of a lack of senior management concerned. I think that that was


a pity and that it could have been avoided had there been greater connection.
With regard to recruiting senior management, I am concerned that there is the wastage of senior management on the naval side. An admiral superintendent retires, I understand, at the age of 55, and as we go lower down the ranks the retirement age becomes considerably earlier. I think that is a loss to the Service and that the talks and discussions between the Admiralty and the Treasury regarding the development of an Admiralty engineering service have not been nearly urgent enough. A great deal more should be done to merge the two so that the Admiralty engineering service in general should benefit.
As to admiral superintendents, let me say straight away that by sentiment and my feeling for the use of the Service I would be most reluctant indeed to take them out of the Admiralty dockyards. We have the recommendation both of the hon. Member for Edmonton and of ourselves that we should break down pure professionalism, but by doing that at the same time we recommend, which we have not done, that to take the admiral superintendent out of the dockyard then we are going back to pure professionalism. I think that it is very important that the two should come together on their functional basis and that it is essential that the user should be represented at the very highest level.
Many of these admirals carry out other functions as flag officers of their various areas. It is important to show the flag. It is very easy to say that this is simply Noel Coward and flag waving, but I think that if the dockyard workers, going to and from work, see the admiral's flag going around that dockyard they know that it will be used if necessary in combat. I think that that is very essential.
There is a broader matter. We have to take into account the needs of the Royal Navy. If we were to reduce the number of admirals drastically and were to take the admiral superintendent's—admirals do not have a field marshal's baton—walking stick—I do not know why he has one, because these gentlemen have good sea-going legs—out of the ditty bag, I think that we shall reduce the standard of entry into the Royal Navy

and I personally would regret that most deeply, because I think that it would be to the detriment of the Service at the saving of a very few pounds.
I wish that the hon. Gentleman and ourselves had got in before Lord Rochdale in having an urgent recommendation. My recommendation and his was that the engineering service should be proceeded with urgently and I should like to hear from my hon. Friend the Civil Lord what progress he can tell us today has been made, because I think that this is essential.
I do not think that I would be too specific about the five to seven years' term. It is a fine judgment. I think that it is the thing to aim for without being too rigid on this point. To say that it is done by outside shipbuilding firms is not necessarily to say that it is of the highest recommendation. My criticism of many of them is that they stay in their position far too long. I would recommend that the 40–50 group should be those brought into senior management. I think that that would be most valuable.
I, with the hon. Gentleman and the Sub-Committee, visited the four great dockyards in this country. Throughout this visit I was impressed by the loyalty and steadfastness and devotion of duty of all concerned. It is important and good that this should be so, because they are not the highest paid in the land. When we consider that the ability of the Navy to fight its battles and control the seas depends very largely upon that spirit one can be thankful that that spirit is shown.

4.36 p.m.

Mr. James Boyden: I think that the Sub-Committee is to be congratulated on the very thorough method in which it followed up the work from 1951. I want to concentrate on one aspect of the Report, paragraph 27, Recommendation No. 8, in relation to the training and wastage of ex-apprentices to which the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Webster) referred.
There can be no doubt that the Admiralty has been extremely dilatory over this problem. It would appear that the Civil Lord indicates assent. The problem has been there a very long time. On the Report made by the Estimates Committee on 25th July and the Admiralty's reply on 30th January it has


got only to the stage when methods of conducting the inquiry are under discussion between the Treasury and the Admiralty, and I hope that the Civil Lord will be able to say that it has got beyond the methods of the actual inquiry and is well on its way to proffering some solution.
There is a remarkable contrast between the way in which the Admiralty handed over its works service at an annual value of £22 million to the Ministry of Public Building and Works, doing it in a matter of weeks, and the long time that it has taken over this difficult problem, but one no more difficult than the problem of the works services. Wastage is extremely serious. It is rather sloppy thinking merely to say that it does industry good.
Unless the costs and methods of training are identified it is difficult to see how reforms can be suggested. The figures given in the Estimates Committee's Report of the 1951–55 crop of apprentices, over 3,000 left the dockyard service by the end of 1961 which is very serious especially when put against the fact that only 8 per cent. of the apprentices in training actually leave while under training, and the cost given in the Report of £1,700 per apprentice is, in broad terms, a loss incurred by the Admiralty of about £1 million a year, which is very serious indeed, not that I want particularly to press the costs aspect.
The fundamental problem is to devise a training and education scheme which will work in with the national system and get the best results all round. I have a feeling that for far too long the departments of the Admiralty concerned with this have been have ring as to who is the right person to deal with it. There has been too much buck-passing. I refer the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare to the Questions Nos. 750 and 751, on page 122. The first question was:
What steps do you take to inform the Admiralty about the causes of this situation?
This was about the wastage of apprentices and who is responsible. The second question included this:
…we have discussed this with the Admiralty and we have rather got the feeling that they regarded this as essentially a problem for local treatment, but when we come locally we find they say it is a problem that cannot be settled except by the Admiralty.

It is rather like the old rhyme:
Great Chatham, with his sabre drawn
Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan.
Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em,
Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.
The problem is a national one and the proposed inquiry recommended by the Estimates Committee is too narrow. There are so many moves for improving training and education today that this is a particularly ripe time for wider discussions on Admiralty apprentices. I hope that the Civil Lord will say that he is entering into such discussions with the people concerned. Local education authorities in the dockyard towns and the Ministry of Education itself are very much concerned with this, as, also, is the Ministry of Labour. Cmnd. Paper 1892 makes suggestions about the widening and intensifying of training, and, quite obviously, the Admiralty must come into this. It will be interesting to hear what is proposed in relation to that. The Ministry of Transport also has very considerable connections with shipbuilding and repairing, and it also should be brought in, as should the shipbuilding industry, the employers and the unions.
The only way in which this problem can be satisfactorily solved is by consultations between all these parties and probably a decision taken as to which is the right way and the right specialisation to deal with it. Without having gone into it adequately myself, it seems to me that there is probably a case for the Royal Dockyards giving up their technical schools and dealing with this through the local education authorities. I am well aware of the compliments paid to the Admiralty's apprentice training, and I thoroughly endorse them. But I think that to get the position clear, so that the Admiralty contribution and the contributions of other partners are made quite clear, it may well be necessary for the Admiralty to give up its own technical colleges and put the staff and facilities into the national pool.
I cannot see that there would be a security problem in this, apart from in a few specialised subjects like electronics. Indeed, there is no security problem, according to the Report, and certainly there is a tendency for the Service Departments to be civilianised. The works services performed by the Admiralty has


now been civilianised, as I have said, and there is a recommendation in this Report for more civilianisation generally.
Therefore, I cannot see why there should be any problem about apprentice-training. Indeed, the excellence of the Admiralty system could have a good effect on technical education locally, and what the local education authorities have to contribute would have a good effect on the Admiralty. This aspect is emphasised throughout the Report in other connections, including management training.
Thus, in the training of apprentices, there are mutual contributions to be made which would make for a much better final result and which could certainly be more economic, although that is not the point. The point is that, with the scarce resources we have for education and for our dockyards, we must ensure that the maximum contribution is made. This is not so much a matter of expenditure, but of getting the maximum effort and results from the organisation we use.

4.45 p.m.

Mr. F. A. Burden: I think that most hon. Members who have been here since the beginning of the debate will agree that it is evident, as usual on these occasions, that, when the matter is non-controversial the quality of debate is extremely high. I listened with very great interest to the speech of the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) and I was pleased that he reminded us of the part taken by the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) in the original considerations regarding the reorganisation of the Royal Dockyards.
There is no doubt that the Royal Dockyards are a more efficient and economic way of providing for the refitting and re-equipment of vessels for the Royal Navy than could have been obtained through private yards. The reason is, of course, that the men are trained to deal only with Her Majesty's ships. The apprenticeship training, which is an essential part of the Royal Dockyards, is one of the most admirable in the country, and there are no demarcation disputes such as so often hold up production in private yards. I cannot remember when there was, if ever, a strike in a Royal Dockyard.
All this helps to ensure that the time factor can be relied upon. The times for

refitting and repairs estimated by the Royal Dockyards are usually adhered to or are fairly closely kept and this, of course, is tremendously important in servicing vessels for the Royal Navy. But, of course, there is also a very deep tradition in the dockyard towns, and I think that my hon. Friends who also have the honour of sitting for dockyard towns would agree that the men and women working there really feel that they are part of the Navy. That is a tradition that we must do our utmost to keep.
The hon. Member for Widnes made a comment that I want to take up. He said that expenditure on the Royal dockyards was about £60 million a year and that they employed some 40,000 people. In Chatham, for instance, there are about 12,000 dockyard workers and it is by far the biggest employer of labour locally. It is the artery from which the economic blood pumps into the towns of Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham, and it is vital to their well-being that its activities be maintained at a very high standard.
Today, of course, new techniques in building are causing considerable strain on the Royal Dockyards, as they are everywhere. They are a challenge, too, and I think that the enormous complexity of modern construction, and particularly the guts that go into the hull, are such that they demand of the artisans and skilled men working in the dockyards standards of efficiency that have never before been demanded.
It is certainly my view that, if the Royal Dockyards are efficient in doing refits for the Navy, they have a right to expect, and it is essential that they be given, new construction. My own view is that men asked to carry out the highly complex refitting of vessels of the Royal Navy today can best learn their jobs through new construction.
The hon. Member for Edmonton has, no doubt, been watching very carefully and with great interest the reorganisation scheme that has been going on in Chatham Dockyard. I believe, from what I am told, that it is a considerable success. If that is so, then I think that we would all join him in asking that the reorganisation of the other yards should be carried out as quickly as possible.
It is a system of the detailed planning of work right down to the man on the


job. In industry generally this must come about if we are to maintain effective production, and today it is no less necessary to ensure effective production in the Royal Dockyards than it is in private industry. The process of reorganisation at Chatham has been almost completed, but it now needs time to settle down and shake out the rough spots. The full results will be seen in three or four years' time, when the present practices have been streamlined and the inevitable teething troubles overcome.
I believe that I intervened when the question of apprentices was raised. The Royal Dockyards ought to be proud of their apprenticeship scheme. Evidence of that is the manner in which private industry does its utmost to coerce apprentices when they have finished their dockyard training. In future it will be necessary to take every possible step to ensure that apprentices stay in Admiralty service.
Hon. Members have referred to the difficulty of recruiting, from among men trained in the dockyard, the high quality of management that is always needed, but I believe that if the considerable expertise that is brought about through the apprenticeship scheme is carried on, and the men who stay in the dockyard after completing their apprenticeships are given encouragement and the opportunity to learn the other arts of management and expertise, there will be no difficulty in recruiting all the top management from the dockyards.
It is inevitable that after the completion of their dockyard training some of these young men will wish to go out into private industry. I see nothing wrong in that. Notwithstanding the desire of many of them to broaden their knowledge, and perhaps travel abroad, we can be sure that they will retain an affection for the dockyards which will, after they have gone overseas or into other jobs for a short time, encourage them to return and settle down in the dockyards. The fact that they have been outside for a period may, in many instances, be instrumental in equipping them for top management.
Mention has been made of the relation between the admiral superintendent and the general manager. So far, the only

yard in which practical experience of this exists is at the Royal Naval Dockyard, Chatham. All the evidence goes to show that there the system is working extremely well. Sometimes there may be the clash of personalities that one gets in other walks of life—in whatever firm or factory one may be.
Perhaps it is unfortunate that the admiral who carries out the duty of admiral superintendent in a dockyard is appointed for so short a period. Consideration ought to be given to the possibility of making his term of service a little longer. I appreciate the difficulties involved. There is the problem of retaining officers in top jobs for too long, and so denying opportunities to the up-and-coming. Nevertheless, the possibility ought to be considered.
I have pressed my hon. Friend on many occasions—and I shall press him again this afternoon—on the question of the wages paid in the Royal Dockyards compared with those paid in private industry. My hon. Friend has admitted the matter is now under consideration. It is not good enough to expect to get really highly skilled technical men working in the dockyards and being happy to remain there if they are not paid wages which are comparable with those that they would receive outside the Royal Dockyards. The loyalty of the dockyard workers, and their emotional approach to service in the dockyards—and that is what it is, in the dockyard towns—should not encourage the Admiralty to be a bad employer in respect of the wages.
The question of the chain of command has been discussed. It works up to a point. The breakdown occurs among the workers on the job. The admiral superintendent and the general manager find great difficulty in projecting themselves as they should to the men on the bench. I have suggested previously that the best way to do this would be for each dockyard to have its own dockyard paper. I know that I shall be told that this would be extremely costly, and that that is the reason why it cannot be done. Nevertheless, I ask my hon. Friend to consider the possibilities of the multi-graph. This machine costs about £1,000, but I use it with great success. I do not wish to advertise it, but it is a very good machine. It would enable dockyards to produce the sort of document that could


be very useful as a dockyard paper, at an extremely reasonable price.
There would be inestimable value in the fact that the admiral superintendent and the general manager would be able to get right down to the men working on the bench. I am sure that my hon. Friends would agree that, above all, it could be used to scotch many of the rumours that go about, and cause such disquiet, to the effect that the naval dockyards are to be closed down. There would be nothing better for stopping these rumours than for the men to have their own opportunity of expressing their views in their own paper, and also for management and the Admiralty to contributing in the same way. I hope that my hon Friend will consider this question and see whether something can be done.
During the evidence brought before the Estimates Committee the question of departmental managers was raised. It is evident that much of the machinery and equipment in the modern vessel of war is so highly technical that men require a great deal of experience and knowledge if they are to do their jobs thoroughly and well. This is impossible unless each department has managers of high quality. Many knowledgeable men in the yards consider that to gain sufficient experience before attaining managerial responsibility a man must have had at least five years in a particular department.
Whatever may have happened in the past, it would seem sensible to me that there should be some sort of yardstick, in view of the demanding nature of modern equipment. Again, I return to the point which I made, that the best recruits may be obtained by ensuring that the apprenticeship scheme in the yards has a proper follow-through, so that ultimately those concerned may have every opportunity to take the highest possible posts open to them in the naval dockyards.
I am concerned about the refusal, so far, by the Admiralty to allow new construction. I think it essential that all naval dockyards should have new construction for the reasons which I have expressed before. The announcement of new construction is reassuring to people in the dockyard towns and gives them confidence about their future and that of the dockyard. I do not believe

it to be in the best interests of the Navy, and certainly not of the naval dockyards or the towns where they are situated, if dockyards are to be turned completely into repair and refitting yards.

5.2 p.m.

Mr. Austen Albu: I am now eleven years older than when as a rather new Member and coming almost straight from a managerial post in industry I presumed to help to compile a Report which made pretty radical suggestions about the management of the Royal Dockyards. Perhaps I am still young enough to be able to blush at the complimentary remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl), for which I thank him. I should like to congratulate him and the Committee on the work done. I know how difficult and how time-consuming is this job, because there is an enormous amount of material which has to be read and a mass of evidence which has to be absorbed. I should like to congratulate the Committee and my hon. Friend on the Report which has been made and on the speeches which have been made by hon. Members who were members of the Committee.
This House, and certainly the country, simply does not recognise the amount of work done by Members of Parliament who serve on Select Committees—the Estimates Committee, the Committee of Public Accounts, the Select Committee which deals with nationalised industries and the ad hoc Committees which are set up from time to time for various purposes. An enormous amount of work is done by hon. Members who take this sort of thing seriously.
I was rather shocked to learn from the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Webster) that apparently the Admiralty tried to resist the inquiries of the Committee on this occasion. After all, it is eleven years since a Committee inquired into the Royal Dockyards. From time to time Questions have been asked and there have been debates and rumours have got out. But if the Navy may be described as the"silent service", the Admiralty is absolutely"dumb". My experience at the time of the inquiry eleven years ago was that some of the permanent officials


were stonewalling so hard that it was difficult to get past them.
That is a very silly attitude to adopt towards Parliament which votes the money. The Admiralty must not consider that Members of Parliament have no experience. They have experience, sometimes industrial and sometimes from other spheres, which may be of value to the Admiralty. As Members of Parliament we are, of course, a body of amateurs and do not presume to advise in great detail. But, after all, the Admiralty continues to claim that the management of the dockyard is better undertaken by amateurs than professionals, and so the Admiralty should appreciate that in this matter Members of Parliament may prove of some use.
It happens that on the question of the structure and management of the Royal Dockyards, we were not even original in 1950–51. There had been the Hilton Report, which the Committee of 1950–51 did not see until towards the end of its deliberations, when it discovered that the majority of the recommendations of the Hilton Committee were almost identical with its own. In addition to the Report of our Committee, there was in 1956 the Report of the Marshall Committee, which is referred to in the Report of the Estimates Committee. There was also my hon. Friends Committee and in the meantime, in 1958, the reorganisation had commenced.
It would be churlish on my part not to congratulate the Admiralty on this late conversion. But the evidence in the Report seems to me to continue to reveal examples of that amateur tradition in which, in our public administration as well as in too much of our industry, we continue to take pride. There was the case of the admiral superintendent who boasted to the Committee that he had never employed anyone except his gardener. By"employed" of course he meant employed or managed in civil life. I do not believe this to be a recommendation for the position of the top official administering a vast industrial undertaking.
Reference was made by the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare to the view that a general manager should not be a professional person. But that is completely to misunderstand the argument. No

one suggests that the general manager, as the head of the undertaking, should operate as a general manager in any specialised capacity, either as an engineer, a salesman, an accountant or as anything else.

Mr. Webster: I do not recall having made that statement.

Mr. Albu: I made a note of the hon. Gentleman's remarks. In defending the position of admiral superintendent, I think the hon. Member said that someone was required with a general view and that we did not want someone who was a professional or departmental manager.

Mr. Webster: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the opportunity to clear up this point by saying that I do not think it a good thing to take the user interest out of the dockyards and that it is possible for them to co-operate.

Mr. Albu: That is the second point, which I will come to in a moment. I shall be able to see in the Official Report what was said by the hon. Gentleman. But I am glad that he agrees with me.
One cannot reach the position of general manager except with experience of some professional position, and that applies in industry. A person must have had some background of education and training before he can reach that position. There would be nothing wrong with an admiral superintendent acting as a general manager if he had time to learn the job. But the position is that the admiral superintendent is not given sufficient time ever to become a general manager. I do not see how we can expect to get a qualified man from any professional background—naval, engineering or any other kind—to manage a vast undertaking when he is responsible to a chairman who is not occupying that office for more than two or three years.

Mr. Burden: Surely that is what happens in industry. There one finds that a chairman has no other function than to be a chairman, but because he occupies that position his value is greater than if he were a professional man in a technical position.

Mr. Albu: I am coming to the question of the number of chairmen under whom the general manager sits. The point is that an admiral superintendent is not the


only chairman to whom the general manager is responsible. He has a whole hierarchy of chairmen who sit on top of him.
On the question about the user, most people in industry believe, and certainly economists believe, that nothing is more disastrous for a company than for it to get itself in such a situation of vertical integration that its user and consumer interests are inextricably mixed. This leads to inefficiency. I think it a good idea that somebody like the admiral superintendent should be in the dockyard to represent the consumer interest, but he ought not to be managing the dockyard on top of the general manager. It will work all right as long as the admiral superintendents keep their fingers out—I was about to use a naval expression—and let the general manager get on with it, while they merely represent the user.
I was utterly depressed, and other hon. Members have been, at the difficulties made by the Treasury in setting up a career engineering service in the Admiralty. This seems typical of the failure of the Admiralty, and many other branches of the Civil Service, to understand the level of professional engineering—by engineering I include the construction side—required, although I noticed in answer to some Questions on the point that it seems to be recognised in the Admiralty that, in future, the level required will be that of a university graduate and not less. I admit that the private shipbuilding industry is a very bad example in this field, and the dockyards are no worse, and, as regards training, a good deal better than private shipyards. Therefore, I think that the hon. Gentleman opposite was slightly missing the point here when he talked about the possibility of a boy coming in as an apprentice and rising to the top.
I should be the last to prevent that happening, but we have to face the realities of our modern educational systems. This has not been faced in a number of industries—for instance, not in British Railways. I believe it may now be beginning to be faced in the Admiralty. This is the problem created by the 1944 Education Act and of the growth of university education and the growth of education in colleges of advanced technology and so forth. We shall not in future find many boys on

the shop floor who will be capable of going on to become professional engineers. In so far as one or two of the right quality still enter craft apprenticeships they must be given the opportunity to go either to a college of advanced technology or to a university. Unless they are given that opportunity they will not be able to undertake the professional duties required in a highly professional industrial undertaking.

Mr. Burden: This was the point that I was trying to make, but I had stated that I intended to limit myself to ten minutes.

Mr. Albu: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman agrees with me in this.
Until we can create a real career structure that is going to attract the best university graduates or the best young men from the colleges of advanced technology and which will give them an opportunity to rise to the top of the profession and become general managers, we shall not get a high-class management structure in the dockyards. It cannot be done on the cheap. We simply have to have a professional engineering salary structure here which will attract these people.
So long as we have the approach that it does not matter because we can always bring in an admiral to manage the dockyard for a year or two, and, therefore, it is of no consequence if we do not get engineers who can become general managers, so long we shall never face the problem, and it has to be faced.
I have never felt quite so anxious about the apprentice wastage question as some hon. Members. That is a problem for the management of the dockyard, which like some private firms has made a magnificent contribution towards the number of skilled craftsmen available in the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) suggested that this training should be amalgamated with the general local apprenticeship system and technical school system. I do not know about that, but I hope that the contribution of the Admiralty will continue to be made to industry in general as in the past and that industry will be forced to pay for this by the Minister of Labour through the machinery of his new apprenticeship councils and so forth as


set out in his White Paper. That is the proper way in which to make industry pay for what it does not do itself.
Finally, when I was interrupted on the question of the admiral superintendent acting as the manager of a company, I was about to say that this hierarchy must make it extraordinarily difficult to get reasonably prompt decisions. We are talking about these general managers as real top level chaps administering vast undertakings. Undoubtedly they must have very great freedom to do so. We all know about the difficulties in the dockyards. They are not manufacturing anything; they are undertaking repair under Service conditions and for Service purposes, and have to maintain in being a capacity for emergencies which manufacturing concerns would not have to maintain.
This wretched business which we insist on of an annual Vote makes complete nonsense of bonus schemes, overtime and the maintenance of plant and machinery. All these things are very difficult and only make the job of the general manager all the harder. Why should he have to go for decisions through so many layers—first to a professional man and then through two levels of amateurs? That is what the admirals who sit on the Board of Admiralty are as far as the general manager is concerned. They know nothing really about industrial management although they may have done a year or two in the dockyards. As I say, the general manager has to go through a professional chief and then through two levels of amateurs before reaching the Board. I do not think this is the way to get the dockyards treated seriously by the Board of Admiralty. I may be wrong and it would appear that the Civil Lord thinks I am, but he has not been long on the Board of Admiralty.

Mr. Hay: I have been there long enough to know hew seriously the Admiralty takes the dockyards.

Mr. Albu: The Board of Admiralty is a very funny animal, and is never funnier than in the way it absorbs Ministers. In the last debate I believe I said that the trouble with the Admiralty was that anyone appointed to it as First Lord or as Civil Lord is so

swallowed up in the tradition and hospitality of the Service that he loses the capacity for independent thought and action. I hope that that is not so with the hon. Gentleman, and in any case we look forward very much to hearing him in the debate today.

5.19 p.m.

Miss Joan Vickers: I do not propose to follow the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) in all the details of what he has said, but I think it only fair to quote the Ninth Report from the Estimates Committee with regard to the evidence given at Chatham. I quote from page 126, paragraph 794. The admiral superintendent was expressly asked:
So you would not agree with the sentiment expressed by an Admiral Superintendent who stated, 'It would be difficult to see what an Admiral Superintendent's job would be under the new arrangements'?—I find it very easy to see what his job would be. I, furthermore, am convinced this is a very much better arrangement. I am quite sure I could not run this dockyard as Admiral Superintendent alone without a General Manager, nor could the General Manager run this dockyard alone as General Manager without an Admiral Superintendent. I am quite convinced that the arrangement we have come to here is very sound. It produces the right balance.
I will not read the rest of it. This admiral superintendent is someone who has been in action and working on the job and we must take his evidence until, at any rate, we find that there is anything proved against it. I suggest that most of the admiral superintendents should be engineering admirals. They would then have experience on the engineering side and on the administrative side at Manadon. We have already had experience of some of them in Devonport. I think they are excellent.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) on the very able and conscientious way in which he presented the Report. I have read it. It must have entailed a great deal of work. As I am not a member of the Estimates Committee, I should like to pay a tribute to the members of the Committee who undertook this work. We owe thanks to the Admiralty for its replies, which have been made quickly this time, and they are from my point of view very acceptable.
I hope that the Admiralty replies to Recommendations (1), (2), (6), (8), (9), (10) and (11) are not merely wishful


thinking and pious hopes. I say this in view of the very long time we had to wait before the Admiralty carried out the previous recommendations. It has proved so helpful this time that perhaps I am a little suspicious that we may be fobbed off with these better answers. No definite dates or periods of time are given in any of these answers. When my hon. Friend the Civil Lord replies, I hope that the Admiralty will be tied down to some specific timing for the action which is proposed to be taken under these recommendations. I should particularly like to see action taken quickly under Recommendation (10), dealing with lands, and Recommendation (11), dealing with machinery.
I want particularly to support the Committee's Recommendations (2), (7), (8), (10), (11), (12) and (13). I am not anxious to support the Committee on Recommendation (5), because it is trying to set the age group too low. We are becoming far too age conscious. Many people think that only very young people are adequate for certain jobs. I suggest that the Admiralty's reply is more satisfactory than the Committee's recommendation.
I would hope for greater flexibility on Recommendation (1). To tie ourselves down to having a quinquennialreview would be unfortunate. It might be necessary to have one more often. I hope that it will not take place less frequently. I think that it should take place more frequently. It is suggested that there will be a review of Chatham in less than the five years, which will be very advantageous.
I realise that it has taken a very long time to put into effect the suggestions of the hon. Member for Edmonton and his Committee. Now that the Committee is to start on Rosyth and Portsmouth in 1964, why is it not possible to include Devonport? We have had the experience in Chatham. I understand that is is successful. Why not do it in the other dockyards straight away and bring them up to the same standard?
A lay person like myself finds it very difficult to get a complete picture. There are so many reports mentioned, such as the Marshall Report, the Dockyard Capacity Report and the Patton Report, none of which are we able to see. These

reports may contain things which prove that it is not possible to reorganise all the dockyards at the same time.
As I understand from this Report, it is the consensus of opinion that the production at Chatham has risen by 2½ per cent. It seems that it must be working well. It is therefore essential to get the other dockyards on an equally good production basis. Some of the five departments mentioned—planning, production, personnel, yard service and finance—must already be in being. I suggest that the reorganisation of all the dockyards on a functional basis could be hurried up.
Is staffing the only reason? The Report says that the total increase in non-productive staff arising from the reorganisation will be about 1,500. Is it necessary to have all these extra staff? How many extra staff will there have to be at Chatham? This is one of the points I have not been able to discover. Cannot some of the experienced staff at Chatham be spared to go to the other dockyards and start work there on a functional basis? The Report says, with regard to the shortage of staff, that the problem of the delay in planning and reorganisation is"not entirely one of inadequate salaries",
but there are
not enough officers with certain skills to go round".
The phrase"not entirely one of inadequate salaries" gives one an idea that the salaries are not good enough to attract people from outside. The Report goes on to say that at Rosyth the headquarters have been extremely embarrassed by the inability to provide sufficient supervisory grades and professional officers. It is very important that they should have them, particularly in view of the extra work arising from Polaris.
At a time when the Admiralty made up its mind that it was to have the dockyards on a functional basis, it seems a pity that it did not train more people in its own yards in its own methods. I hope that today's discussion and the Report result in a better career structure in the dockyards. This is what is lacking. There is far too little scope for initiative within the dockyards, which is a great pity.
Several hon. Members have mentioned apprentices. The success in the training of apprentices is shown by the fact that there are many former apprentices in very high administrative posts outside dockyards. In many departments of the Civil Service, in the Post Office, there is an amazing number of ex-dockyard apprentices. If they can leave the dockyards and obtain important jobs outside, why is it not possible to train them to take more responsible posts within the dockyards? People come down to Plymouth—I meet them—and tell me that they are now in very good jobs but were once dockyard apprentices. We lose far too many such people.
It is obvious why we lose so many of them. One witness says in an answer on page 223 that they should remain craftsmen the rest of their lives. It is a very depressing idea that one recruits apprentices so that they can remain craftsmen for the rest of their lives. This is why so few grammar school boys are going to the apprentice technical colleges now. Most of the recruits have to come in on aptitude tests, which is a pity. People are becoming dockyard apprentices who are likely to remain craftsmen for the rest of their lives because people are not coming in through the higher examination as they used to. In the olden days dockyard technical colleges in dockyard towns were the places where people could get the best technical education. It is a great pity that there is this very large wastage from the yards, but understandable.
Another reason is that after five years training the mechanic's wage is only £10 4s. 2d. Policemen at the dockyard gates, and even girl tracers, get that money without all that training. This is a very inadequate amount on which to start.
There is, too, the problem of the low level of pay of unskilled men. This was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham (Mr. Burden). The previous Civil Lord wrote to me on 8th March saying that he was negotiating with the trade unions on a claim for a general wage increase. It is unfortunate to say that the average wage for all workers is about £15, with some getting £18 and £20, because such an average

wage does not count with those who are getting under £15. There are over 131 trades and grades within the dockyard, so there is a terrific differentiation between those who take home £15 and those who take home about £8.
I absolutely agree that overtime as mentioned in the Report should not be an integral part of a man's income. That is a great difficulty in dockyards, and it can work out extremely expensive, because—and I do not say that this is happening—some people might tend to work rather more slowly so that they are able to augment their incomes by doing overtime. As I say, I am not suggesting that this is being done—only that it could lead to bad practices. I hope that this important matter will be borne in mind.
Recommendation No. 11 deals with methods of financing the purchase of machinery for the dockyards. It is stated that the period two or three years ahead is being considered. This is useless when, as the hon. Member for Edmonton said, we must have the annual Navy Votes. It is impossible to get the necessary machinery. It is stated on page 191, in evidence:
For instance, if you want a machine this year, they say, 'We cannot get it in this year.' We are only allowed £10,000 for replacement of machinery. The £10,000 is gone by May. We start in April and by May that has gone. So you have got to wait until next year.
I am sure that no private industry could possibly work on that basis. If the machinery required is essential for the working of the yard, it should be obtained even if one must take the money that may come in future Estimates. It is essential to estimate for machinery on at least a three-year basis—I personally would prefer a ten-year basis—and then the Admiralty can adequately go into the question of machinery and decide what it needs for a number of years. Only by doing it this way will we have modern, up-to-date machinery.
I was also interested to note from the Report that there is a study engineer of obsolete machinery. This chap must be kept working overtime because of the amount of obsolete machinery that exists in most yards. An example of this is the case of work being held up through the lack of proper machinery. This example concerns the South Yard at


Devonport. It was suggested that there should be a prefabricated shop that is for making frigate parts. The discussions for doing this have been going on for a year or two, and I gather that originally the project was to have cost about £500,000. I understand that that sum has been reduced somewhat because the scheme is to be modified.
Throughout last winter the frigate parts had to be prefabricated in the open; and hon. Members will remember the very bad weather conditions last winter. The men had to work in the snow and a good deal of illness resulted. This meant the men working in extremely difficult conditions. The sort of construction that has been under consideration for one or two years shows how work can be handicapped by lack of essential equipment. We ought to have up-to-date working conditions for our dockyard men.
The question of contracts is mentioned in the Report. I understand that the Director of Contracts calls for tenders and that because of high overheads of the naval dockyards—because a certain number of people must always be employed there as a sort of fire service—it is inevitable that a private firm is given the contract. The Admiralty then pays the contractor and the waiting time of the people in the dockyard, and because of this—the expenses of the contract and the cost involved for the people waiting in the dockyard—the whole job is made more expensive than if it were done in the dockyard.
An example of this concerns riggers. These people are needed for dealing with big ships, such as aircraft carriers. They have to be on hand. However, when they are not employed on this sort of task, could they not handle the wire and rope side of the dockyard, making mine-sweeping gear, and so on? Instead of putting the contract out to British Ropes Ltd., surely these men when they are not moving big ships—and they cannot be doing that all the time;—could be employed on this sort of work and so save the Admiralty a lot of money.
I support the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham about the publication of a newspaper for the dissemination of information in dockyards. This has been done with

great success elsewhere, and I see no reason why it should not be done in the dockyards. It could be done on a similar basis to the newspaper published by the Coal Board. I understand that that publication makes a profit and gives full information to the individuals concerned who, by reading all about it, know exactly what is happening. When 40,000 men are employed in one organisation it is difficult to get the information to all of them. Since this scheme has worked so successfully in the Coal Board, I support the comments of my hon. Friend about encouraging it to be spread elsewhere.
The importance of Recommendation No. 7, regarding training, has been emphasised by several hon. Members, it is interesting to note that only 1,200 people have been sent on courses in seven years. That represents about 170 a year, although there are six training colleges to which they could go. This would not appear to be a very generous number. If we want to get better administrators in the dockyards—and I entirely agree with the idea of the hon. Member for Widnes about these people mixing and discussing matters among themselves—it would be far better to make better use of the various courses that are set out in the Report. If the colleges are full up, could not Greenwich be used for some administrative courses? I understand that there is under-occupation at Greenwich now. It is important, especially in view of what has been said about Rosyth, that people should be trained for this administrative work and that they should go through the dockyards to enhance their career structures. Every opportunity should be taken quickly to solve this problem.
I wish to pay tribute to the fine body of men who work in our dockyards. Members of the Committee who visited them were able to see the extremely difficult conditions under which they work. They will be pleased to know that despite these difficulties and the bad weather of last winter H.M.S."Eagle" in Devonport should be completed by 23rd December. Those who went to Devonport Dockyard will realise the tremendous good work these men are doing.
I understand that of those employed in the dockyards over 3 per cent. are disabled. This shows how the dockyards


are doing a great job of helping many ex-Service disabled people to lead active lives. It is a great advantage to those with a Service background to be able to get jobs in dockyards when they might find it extremely difficult to get jobs elsewhere.
I understand that the Director of Dockyards is to visit Continental dockyards. Will we see his report? At present we have nothing on which to base the standards of our dockyards and, despite all the reports mentioned in the Ninth Report, we cannot read them. It would be a great advantage if we could. Will he also study questions concerning trade unions? I believe, for example, that in the Netherlands there are only three main trade unions in which all the others are incorporated. That is why the Netherlands are able to get on with their shipbuilding and repairing so well. In Britain 131 trades and grades are represented by our unions, and this is not helpful to management nor production.
I hope that my hon. Friend will tell us whether the work on providing housing at Rosyth will be carried on by the Ministry of Public Building and Works when it takes over, and whether there is any intention of houses being erected for civilians near the other dockyards. People sent from the existing dockyards to Singapore or Gibraltar—not so many now go to Malta—find the housing situation quite impossible. The Admiralty has been building large largely for the Navy, and nothing has been done for the civilians, who are in equally difficult circumstances.
I thank the hon. Member for Widnes and the members of his Committee for an interesting Report, and I hope that the many Recommendations, except Recommendation (5) will be accepted.

5.40 p.m.

Mr. W. A. Wilkins: The Estimates Committee and the Admiralty should be gratified by the response that has been given today to this Report and to the Admiralty's observations on it. The hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) is always most charitable—indeed, gracious—in her appreciation of her colleagues' work, and we all appreciate what she has said about our rather difficult task.
I travel from Bristol to London by train, and on it there are very often members of the Admiralty staff. On one occasion, I heard two of them expressing their views about the Estimates Sub-Committee E. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is not the first time that I have heard people in trains expressing their opinions about their Members of Parliament. There must, of course be no question of disciplinary action—I just enjoyed it immensely.
The work of the Estimates Committee on almost any investigation is a very hard chore. It has to be undertaken in the interests of good Government, but it makes great demands on time and mental concentration. The same is true of those who are interrogated by the Committee, and I should like to express our thanks for the courteous way in which the Committee was treated by all members of the Admiralty staff who were called before it, or who had the perhaps, unpleasant duty of conducting us round naval dockyards, and the like. They were extremely frank, and tried to give us the advantage of their knowledge, not only of what had transpired in the past but what was likely to happen in the future.
One matter should be cleared up at once, less there should be any misunderstanding. It has been stated today that when Sub-Committee E decided to investigate the dockyards, the Admiralty rather wanted to put us off. I do not think that was the case. The Admiralty may have thought, may still think, that the moment was inappropriate as certain processes of reorganisation had begun. My impression was that the Department thought that it would have been wiser to have allowed the first pilot scheme at Chatham to be carried into effect so that we could see the first results of the Recommendations of the 1950–51 Committee. If those at the Admiralty thought that would put us off they are not very good psychologists, because it always impels people to ask whether there is anything behind the suggestion. I cannot think that there was anything behind it, and the various members of the staff were most helpful to us.
Some of the things in the Report may appear to be critical but they are not necessarily so, and should not in the main be regarded as adverse. My hon.


Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl) has asked me to draw attention to something to which he forgot to refer when presenting the Report. Paragraph 49 of our conclusions states:
The reorganisation proposals are consistent with the recommendations of the Select Committee on Estimates of 1950–51. Your Committee are impressed with the care with which the reorganisation is being carried out and in particular with the attention being given to preparing the ground and keeping employees in touch with what is happening.
That fairly reflects our impression on going round the dockyards.
I am inclined to agree with the suggestion that it may be difficult for hon. Members to appreciate just exactly what is involved in this massive organisation. I saw that organisation at first hand, because I served in the Royal Navy in the First World War—I have pushed a few carts around Portsmouth Dockyard in rather unpleasant circumstances. Wherever one has vast organisations one always finds weaknesses. By and large, I would not be unduly critical of the general conduct of the dockyards or of the labour force in them.
There is, of course, always the odd chap who goes aboard a ship and suddenly disappears. Nobody sees him again that day, but he may be working hard. I have been in the most unpleasant parts of a huge battleship, where working conditions can be rather shocking. People talk about a dockyard"matey" boarding a ship and disappearing, but he is very likely working in one of the most difficult, out-of-the-way places, probably right at the bottom of the ship, carrying out a repair in most unfavourable circumstances. I am not so critical in these matters as some may be.
There are two points I want to mention specifically: we have not in any way been definite in our recommendation about the positions of admiral superintendent and general manager. We merely say:
The system of control by an Admiral Superintendent and a General Manager should be kept under constant review as the reorganisation develops.
I see no reason why I should not say now that this was probably because there were divergent views in the subcommittee. I never felt that my own objections to other views expressed were sufficiently strong to justify making a minority recommendation on this point,

but I am inclined still to favour as the supreme head of the dockyards an admiral superintendent. I believe that this has advantages, and I speak from knowledge and from my own service and of my recollection of the respect given to the flag in the dockyards.
Although the majority of the employees are civilians, it is vital that there should be some sort of disciplinary control in a place of that kind. Therefore, unless arguments to the contrary are so powerful that they could change my opinion, I would still prefer to see an admiral superintendent in overall command. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) who pointed out that he need not necessarily be a professional man. Nevertheless, I would make a qualification, in agreement with the hon. Lady the Member for Devonport, that he should be someone who has gone through the Service as an engineer. If he has gone through the Royal Navy from the time when he was a midshipman or a sub-lieutenant until he has become an admiral or rear-admiral (engineering) his experience is vast.
Anyone who knows the internals of a mighty battleship knows that there is a great deal to be understood and applied in the mechanical operation of modern ships. This is all the more true today with the trend towards automatic or electronic control. Therefore, there is a twofold reason for keeping the admiral superintendent as overall head of the dockyard. I have suggested that he should be an engineer. We all know that there are other plums available to the seaman admiral and that from time to time such appointments are made.
Almost all who have taken part in the debate have touched upon the apprenticeship recommendations which we made. I heard some of my hon. Friends support their colleagues when they referred to the value of the apprenticeship training in dockyard establishments and spoke of its value to the nation as a whole even if the apprentices eventually leave the dockyard. I have some reservations about this. I am not so heartily in support of the extension, if not the continuation at the present level, of the intake of dockyard apprentices. There is no shadow of doubt that this is probably one of the finest training establishments in the


country. I doubt whether there is any parallel to it in ordinary business life. It is a first-class training, educational, mechanical and theoretical, and it seems to me appalling that we should spend £1,700,000 a year on giving these boys this training and then almost certainly lose at least half of them.
It may be argued that they go into productive industry and that their skills are used to produce goods which we sell abroad. We can go round the full circle of the advantages gained by private industry but this means that private industry is not paying its share. It is utilising these skills for its own purposes, which are not necessarily concerned with the national interest. This is an advantage which accrues to private industry in the main out of taxpayers' money.
I know that there is a difficulty here and I agree on this point with the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Webster). I believe that I asked the Permanent Secretary whether it would not be possible to require at the end of apprenticeship some limited continuance of service in Admiralty dockyards and that it was suggested that that was not possible.

Mr. Willis: Would my hon. Friend accept that in the printing industry?

Mr. Wilkins: I am only posing the question. In the printing industry the apprentice coming out of his time would have the attraction of having the same rate of wages in any shop. The general practice used to be in the printing industry to encourage apprentices to leave to gain experience. This would be all very well in this case if it could be thought that the boys would come back to the Admiralty dockyards, but I doubt whether that would happen once they had left the service. I pose the question without being able to offer a profitable suggestion, but this is a great deal of money to spend when eventually the value of the training given is lost to the dockyard and to the nation.
I am sure that the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes, and all the members of the Committee will be very happy at the reception given to its Report. I say this before my hon. Friend the Member

for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis) sets about us in a moment or so. Generally speaking, the Report has been well received. I hope that the reorganisation scheme, which appears to be proving successful, will be extended further, if that should prove possible.
A further point arises on the recommendation concerning demarcation. We are now witnessing even in Admiralty dockyards something which no doubt will develop throughout industry. We are seeing the need more and more for the creation of industrial unions in the place of a number of segregated unions. In the printing industry there are at the moment thirteen different unions but the industry is trying to bring about amalgamations. I believe that the only solution for demarcation problems will be found eventually in an industrial union. The tendency today is towards this. The Admiralty is to be congratulated on the small number of demarcation problems which have arisen in its dockyards, certainly compared with private establishments. I hope that this trend will continue. I hope that reorganisation will be speeded up and that benefits will accrue to the Admiralty dockyards and to all who are engaged in this work.

6.0 p.m.

Brigadier Terence Clarke: As a representative of our premier naval dockyard, I am grateful for the opportunity of making a few remarks in the short time that is left in this debate. I should have liked to have spoken for three-quarters of an hour; perhaps that is why I have been called so late in the debate, in case I might have spoken for so long.
I was very pleased to hear the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Wilkins) say that he thought that admiral superintendents should be retained in our dockyards. During the fourteen years that I have represented Portsmouth, West there have been many admiral superintendents in the dockyard, and they have all been good. The one we have at the moment is the best that we have ever had. That is because he is an engineer; he is engineer-trained. In the future all admiral superintendents should be engineers basically, rather than officers requiring the next step up in promotion. Our present


admiral superintendent is very active and efficient, and it is a pity that his time comes to an end this year.
I am going to jump from one subject to another because I have promised to resume my seat soon to allow the Minister and the Opposition Front Bench speaker to wind up. It has been suggested that expensive machinery should only be installed in the dockyards if it can be used continually and economically. There are many pieces of machinery in our dockyards which cannot be used all the time. On one occasion I saw a propeller shaft being built on a most expensive piece of machinery. Such machinery cannot be used unless one requires to build a propellor shaft, and the machinery required to do this is bound to be expensive. It is essential to have a machine like that, even if it is lying idle for a year, because during the succeeding two years it is kept very busy. Anyone walking casually around a dockyard will see pieces of machinery which are not working. I must say that in recent years the dockyards have been filled with excellent modern machinery which is welcomed by all employed in the dockyards.
Recently the Civil Lord has been accused of saying that there will be redundancy and that the dockyards will close down. That is not at all true. I should like to give some figures to show the numbers employed in these dockyards and how they have varied. In 1949–50 15,400 people were employed in Portsmouth Dockyard. In 1950–51 the number went up to 16,500. The Korean War was in progress then, and there was a lot of repair work. In 1952 the number went up to 16,884, and in 1954 it reached its peak for that period of 17,472. There was a slight drop after that of 1,000, and in 1958 it went up to 17,480, which is the highest it has ever been. Today the figure is well over 16,000 and is much higher than it was when the Labour Government were in office.
We on this side of the House have been called warmongers in the past, and now we are accused of cutting down armaments and putting the dockyards out of work. I am in favour of keeping the dockyards fully employed, but I hope the time is coming when we shall get some sort of disarmament programme.

In anticipation of that situation I hope that our dockyard towns will be allowed to attract other industries so that we have more than one egg in that basket. In Portsmouth we have attracted quite a lot of industry in the past ten or twelve years, but nothing like as much as I should like. The Admiralty is always accused of preventing other industry coming to dockyard towns. I do not believe this to be true. I believe it is the Board of Trade which is responsible, and I do not think this attitude is encouraged by the Admiralty.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham (Mr. Burden) spoke of the desirability of encouraging new construction in the dockyards. I am in favour of this. We in Portsmouth are lucky in that a new frigate is having its keel laid. We have built many frigates before. I agre with my hon. Friend that it is extremely dull work just patching and repairing ships, such as has been the major lot of our dockyards. To be allowed to construct something new, to break a bottle of champagne on its bow and to push out a new vessel which will do a good job in looking after our Commonwealth more than repays our efforts to get new construction for the dockyards.
I should like to say a word or two about wages. It has been suggested that employees in the dockyards do not all do a full day's work. I reckon they do a wonderful day's work, in view of the amount of pay that some of them get. Many of them take home less than £9 a week, which is not encouraging to anyone. If only the trade unions were stronger they would see that these men got a better wage. Many of us have been pressing for this for a long time, and I hope the Civil Lord will be able to tell the House when we next debate the Estimates Committee Report that he has been able to increase these dockyard wages to a decent living standard.
I have overspent my time by a minute, but I should like to add my protest that a representative of the premier naval dockyard has not been allowed more than five or six minutes in which to state his views.

6.7 p.m.

Mr. E. G. Willis: We are indebted to the Estimates Committee for having produced this Report for our


discussion and also to my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes (Mr. McColl) for the charming manner in which he opened the debate.
The debate has been interesting, and I have certainly enjoyed it, although I have felt that we have tended to lose sight of the fact that the efficiency of the dockyards is meaningless unless it is related to the purpose for which we want that efficiency. The dockyards exist to meet the needs of the Royal Navy, which is a fighting Service. This fact appears to have been overlooked at times. I hope, during the course of my remarks, to explain why I feel it has been overlooked, but I thought that I would mention it at the beginning because I do not think that any speech has referred to it except possibly the speech of the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Webster).
The main concern of the House this afternoon has been with the change that is at present taking place from the old arrangement of semi-autonomous departments to an organisation built up on a functional basis. So far as I can see, there is no argument about that, for it now appears to be the generally accepted view. There has been criticism of the fact that the Admiralty has taken so long to start it, and is taking rather a long time to get the job done. Also, the Treasury appears to have been dilatory.
My hon. Friend the Member for Widnes had some rather humorous remarks to make about the Admiralty, but I noticed that he said that he did not know much about the dockyards before this survey. Had he known much about the dockyards and the Admiralty, he would not have been surprised at all. This is the way the Admiralty does things and it is certainly a most inconvenient way for the House of Commons. As for stonewalling, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu), the Admiralty had a Permanent Secretary who was notorious for this, both before the Public Accounts Committee and the Estimates Committee. I do not say that in any criticism of him, because I think he was at that time serving the Admiralty very well, but he certainly made it difficult for Members of the House.

Major Sir Frank Markham: In fairness, will the hon. Gentle-

man agree that this stonewalling becomes sheer obstructionism on the part of a civil servant and may well militate against the best interests of the nation?

Mr. Willis: No, I should not say that. I think that he was acting in what he considered to be the best interests of the Admiralty. He was obstructive in the sense that it was rather difficult at times to get from him the information which we required. I put it like that, not as a very great criticism. He certainly rendered very valuable service to the Admiralty over a very long time. I believe that most people associated with the Navy would express that view of the value of his services to the Navy.
The argument today has been about the various points arising from the putting into effect of the present policy of changing from semi-autonomous departments to an organisation on a functional basis. My first question is to ask what progress has been made. We know that Chatham is completed. Rosyth is partially completed. When is Rosyth likely to be finished? We are told that the job at Portsmouth is likely to be started next year. How long will it take? When is it intended to deal with Devonport? Is it expected to complete the job by 1968, 1970 or when? Is this another of the things that the Tory Party are looking to the 'seventies for? Is it one of the bright vistas we can look to in the 'seventies? We ought to have some information about it.
To what extent is the Admiralty getting the staff necessary for the job? According to the Report, 1,500 men were required to complete the job. I do not know whether the number still remains the same. Possibly, with the prospective reduction in the numbers employed in the dockyards, 1,500 may not now be required. I should like to know. Incidentally, this point illustrates the rather dilatory way, in some respects, in which the Admiralty has tackled the job. It was known in 1958 that these people would be required, and we are now in 1963. So far as one can gather, progress at Rosyth, never mind the other two large dockyards, is still held up because of shortages. What are the Government doing about this?
Linked with that is the question of increasing the number of managerial or professional appointments. One of the


recommendations discussed today is that managerial appointments, where they are made from the Service, should be for five or seven years. Some hon. Members have laid great emphasis upon this. In its reply to the Committee, the Admiralty said that it has accepted this recommendation in principle, but limited to four years; in other words, a person will hold the job for four years only.
I am rather on the side of the Admiralty in this. It is a difficult question to answer. There is great discontent in the Service if people do not get their two or three years' spell at home, and, while I admit the need for as long appointments as possible, I think that we must balance the needs of the dockyards with the needs of the Navy.
This is why I said at the outset that I thought the needs of the Navy tended to be overlooked. I thought this, too, when I read the Report of the Estimates Committee because, in paragraph 16, it said:
Your Committee appreciate the importance of giving naval officers the best possible career consistent with efficiency and economy, but they consider that to put the careers of individual naval officers before the efficiency of the Dockyards is wrong.
That may be so, but it is equally wrong to put the efficiency of the dockyards before the efficiency of the Fleet. Let us make no mistake about it. A senior officer, or any officer, who has had wide experience of a great number of things is usually the most efficient officer. It seems to me, therefore, that we should balance these two factors. It is not just a matter of saying that the dockyards must have men who can stay there for five, six or seven years. It is also a matter of asking how long we think that they ought to stay in order to meet the needs of the Service.
I find it difficult, therefore, to agree altogether with my hon. Friends who have suggested emphatically that the appointments should be for five or seven years. I know the arguments about it. They have been made in the Zuckerman Committee about research and development in the Service Departments and in other spheres, too, and there is no doubt that the old two-year period is too short; a man spends the first year settling in and the second year thinking about where he is going next. I welcome the

Admiralty's decision to make it four years, with the possibility that it might be longer if that is found to fit in with the requirements of the Service.
I have difficulty also in accepting entirely what my hon. Friend the Member for Widnes said about Recommendation No. 3, the recruiting of outside men to senior professional posts. There are strong arguments for this, but I think that there are very strong arguments for avenues of promotion within the Service itself. We are tending to expand in this section, which, perhaps, makes it attractive to bring men in from outside, but I suggest that we should not overlook the fact that the men in the dockyards and the Service are themselves entitled to promotion.
I have spoken very often from this Box about the need for engineers on the Board of Admiralty, because I thought that we should not get the best engineers, electrical officers or whatever it might be unless there was the possibility of their reaching the top. This is necessary to build up the efficiency of the Navy. Indeed, everything we are talking about exists to serve the efficiency of the Navy.
The same argument applies to the admiral superintendent. I think that he might not be necessary, although, on balance, in the new structure, I may well be wrong. But, apart from the balance we must strike with regard to what work he will do and the Service duties he will perform, there is a case for seeing that we give opportunity in the Service for proper prospects of promotion. These things are extremely important.
We have discussed one aspect of the reorganisation of the dockyards about which the former Civil Lord had something to say during the Estimates debate. I refer to the formation of an Admiralty Engineering Service. How far has this organisation got? To what extent is it in existence? On 11th March, the Civil Lord told us that
We have at present no civilian mechanical engineers to match the civilian electrical engineers."—[Official Report, 11th March, 1963; Vol. 673, c. 976.]
I do not know what that means. Does it mean that there is none at the moment, or have some been recruited?
The second recommendation concerning the organisation of an Admiralty engineering service was that there should be an


increase in the number of electrical engineers—not top electrical engineers but men with slightly lower qualifications. The Civil Lord said nothing about this during the Navy Estimates debate. I should like to know what has been done about this Admiralty engineering service. This is one of the important parts of the Report and one of the important needs of the dockyards if past Reports are accepted. I have read the speech of the Civil Lord several times to try to find out exactly what it means. Up to now I have not been very successful. I should, therefore, be grateful to the present Civil Lord if he would say something about this.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the waste of apprentices and the fact that about 1,000 apprentices are taken in each year about 500 of which leave after they have finished their time. I am not greatly concerned about that. I am glad that they have been trained, because if there is one thing that we need in this country it is all the trained manpower that we can get. It is, however, wrong that this should appear on the Navy Vote. The cost of training 500 apprentices each year who are not required for naval purposes and who go into private industry should not be a charge against the Navy Estimates. The Government should find some method to take them out of the Navy Estimates.
I was interested in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden), who said that this matter should be looked at and that there should be discussions between the Ministry of Labour on the one hand, and the Ministry of Education and the Department of Education in Scotland, on the other, as to how this could be fitted in with the Government's proposals for the training of manpower for industry. Let us make no bones about it: here are excellent first-class facilities for training men and I think that we should use them. They could be changed in certain ways if necessary. If this country is to make the progress that we want it to make, every trained man is a very valuable asset and we cannot afford to neglect any opportunites for tarining these men. May I say, in passing, that I should like to see the facilities of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich used just as fully.
The important point is not so much that 500 men are trained in the dockyards and then leave to go into civilian industry but what is to happen in future. This is a charge which should not be borne by the Navy Estimates. This is a case of the Navy doing a very good job for industry, and it seems to me that there are certain potentialities here in whatever schemes the Government may have for the future training of men for industry.
The chain of command should be considered. At present we have two Sea Lords at the top of the chain of command. We then come down to the Third and Fourth Sea Lords. Under them is the Director-General of Dockyards and Maintenance. Under him is the Director of Dockyards. Under him is the Deputy Director. Then we come down to the Admiral Superintendent. Is there any necessity for this? Surely at least one of these posts could be eliminated. I should have thought that the one to be eliminated should be either the Third or Fourth Sea Lord. The opportunity should be taken to eliminate one of these posts in connection with the review into bringing the Defence Departments closer together and unifying them, which, according to the Press, will involve the abolition of the Board of Admiralty. If the structure at the top of the Admiralty is to be changed, there is a good opportunity to do that.
I find it quite unintelligible that the Third Sea Lord should be the controller and the Fourth Sea Lord the deputy controller. What is the need for this? Surely the Director-General of Dockyards and Maintenance could be responsible to one Sea Lord? A very favourable opportunity is provided for the Admiralty to abolish one of them without causing any difficulty. I shall watch to see whether this is done when we learn and discuss the proposals regarding defence.
In the main, the Admiralty has accepted the other recommendations. There is no doubt that, by and large, they appear to be recommendations which will improve the efficiency of the dockyards and therefore they should prove of value.
We are indebted to the Estimates Committee for the work which it has put into its Report. It is not easy to follow


the ramifications of any Admiralty structure, as the Civil Lord is probably learning. Certainly that applies to the dockyards. On behalf of my hon. Friends, I express our appreciation of the work done by the men in the dockyards. They do a very good job of work and, as has been said in the debate, they are not overpaid.

Mr. Burden: Hear, hear.

Mr. Willis: They tend to be underpaid, which is a great pity. They do a first-class job and I think that every hon. Member is grateful to them for that.

6.27 p.m.

The Civil Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. John Hay): In opening what has proved to be a most interesting debate, the hon. Member for Widnes (Mr. MacColl), who was in the Chair of the Sub-Committee of the Estimates Committee which conducted the investigation into the Royal dockyards, reminded us of some of the advantages which flow from examination by Committees of this House of the activities of Government Departments. One advantage mentioned by the hon. Gentleman which particularly struck me was that they conveyed to hon. Members information and instruction as to how Government Departments work and what they do. I must admit that I have been enormously indebted to the Committee for the admirable Report which it produced and the information which it gave because, as a complete tyro in these matters, I felt the need for immediate instruction on some of the complicated matters involved in Royal Dockyard arrangements. I therefore benefited very much from reading the Committee's Report.
May I at the outset clear away a slight misunderstanding which seems to have affected the minds of some hon. Members, although I think that the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Wilkins) has largely cleared it away. It is an exaggeration to say, as I think one hon. Member said and as other hon. Members have inferred, that the Admiralty thought that this was a wrong thing to do, that we resisted in some way a further investigation by the Estimates Committee. As the hon. Member for Bristol, South said, the truth is that we felt quite honestly that, as we were in the middle of a massive reorganisation of the dockyard

structure, it might be better if the Committee were prepared to defer its further examination for a year or, perhaps, two years until that reorganisation had got further under way. There was certainly no intention, I am advised, of trying to fob off the Committee or to get it to do something else. Cynics may well say that Government Departments never think that it is an appropriate moment for their activities to be investigated. That may or may not be true. Nevertheless. I feel that in this instance the Admiralty had a better excuse than usual.
Having said that, I pass to the reorganisation, about which a number of questions have been asked. I am happy to tell the House that we are now making very good progress with the reorganisation of the dockyards on the functional basis which was recommended by the Select Committee. I hope that the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Albu) and the hon. Member for Widnes will forgive me if I do not follow them in the historical reminiscences and the background to all this. I am comparatively new in the Department and all I can say is that I hope we shall go on meeting with approval in their eyes from now on. As I think the House knows, the change has been brought into full force at Chatham. We have appointed a general manager at Rosyth and we have appointed a general manager-designate for Portsmouth.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis) asked how we were progressing with the reorganisation. At Rosyth, we expect soon to appoint the managers for the production and planning departments and we expect that the whole process of reorganisation there will be completed in about two to three years. At Portsmouth, we hope that the first stage of reorganisation will be completed by 1966 and we will commence the reorganisation at Devonport in 1965. As the Committee reminded the House, we expect that the whole process will be ended by 1968.

Mr. Burden: My hon. Friend agrees that it is important to have management reorganisation, but will he not also agree that it is necessary that the most modern equipment should be installed in the dockyards if the reorganisation is to be carried to its logical and proper conclusion?

Mr. Hay: I hope to say something about machinery and subjects of that kind. At the moment, I am dealing simply with the technical problem of the reorganisation of the management.

Mr. Willis: How are the Government getting on concerning the 1,500 men that they will require?

Mr. Hay: We imagine that that is the right number which we shall need and I think that we shall get them.
As a newcomer, it seemed to me that this type of reorganisation was the right one to adopt. One of the most significant comments in the Report is that made by the Committee in paragraph 49 where it stated, with the appropriate qualifications:
Nevertheless, as far as Your Committee can weigh the available evidence, they are satisfied that a right decision was taken to proceed with reorganisation.
It is interesting to note that evidence was given by people outside which endorsed the desirability of this new type of organisation. I need draw attention only to the answers given by Mr. James Patton, a very well-known person in the shipbuilding and ship-repairing world, who was chairman of the Patton Committee which produced a valuable Report on these matters. He agreed that when the reorganisation was originally proposed in 1958, opinion inside the private ship-repairing industry would probably have been by no means unanimous that it was the right form of organisation to adopt. However, I think that we are doing the right thing now.
A rather more difficult point is the extent to which it is possible to relate the benefits of reorganisation to productivity. This was touched upon by the Select Committee and I am a little surprised that we have not had more comment on the point this afternoon. It may, however, be interesting to the House if I say a word about it.
I must admit that at this early stage it is virtually impossible to point to particular benefits in the form of lower costs or reduced staffs, a quicker turn-round of ships or similar criteria, although I hope that in due course it will be possible to do so. There are, however, some definite advantages which the reorganisation has brought. To start with, it has given us a much more effective manage-

ment on modern industrial lines in a form which enables new management techniques and production processes to be more easily absorbed and applied over the yards as a whole.
We are able to make more effective use of our labour force by better planning of our work, by ensuring that drawings, materials, tools and the services of the various tradesmen can be provided when they are required and by identifying and forecasting periods of idle time. This better degree of planning and estimating must lead to more realistic assessments of costs of repairs and reviews in terms of both men and money, and completion dates can be kept. In turn, this will enable us to form better judgments on the value of or the priorities of projected work, to improve the availability of ships and to restrict the cost, because any extension of time allocated for a refit inevitably leads to great expense.
As to the first recommendation of the Select Committee, which suggested that we should review the non-industrial establishment every five years at each dockyard, the Admiralty accepted the idea, although, in fact, we shall be able to do rather better than the Committee proposed. As we said in our reply, we consider that some measure of flexibility in the timing of these reviews is best and we shall conduct the first joint review at Chatham within a considerably shorter time than five years.
As I have said, the reorganisation at Chatham began in 1958 and we are now arranging for a review of the staff and of the organisation of the general manager's planning, production, personnel and yard services departments, to start with, towards the end of this year. We expect it to take us about 12 months, but we should get information on which we can see whether the organisation and staffing of what has been the pilot scheme for the whole reorganisation process is right and can be taken as a guide to reorganisation in the other yards.
I turn now to the Admiralty Engineering Service, which was the subject of Recommendation No. 2. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, East asked how we were getting on with this and my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Webster) and the hon. Member for Edmonton also referred to


it. It is an important step that we are taking and there can be no blame for the delay, which was imposed upon us, before we were able to get the green light to go ahead. There is no doubt, as I think the Committee realised from the evidence given to it, that the creation of a service of this kind was liable to have repercussions in other fields of the Government service and those had to be carefully looked at before we could be given authority to go ahead. Nevertheless, it is true to say that the views taken by the Committee weighed powerfully in Whitehall and I am delighted that we are now able to proceed with this service.
We have had to have a number of meetings with the staff associations to satisfy them of the Tightness of the scheme and we obtained their agreement last April. The head of the new service and his deputy have both been appointed and we have widely advertised vacancies in the new service. So far, we have had hundreds of replies and the first interview boards will beheld this month. We are considering suitable retired and retiring naval officers who have professional qualifications for appointments in the service. This was another point in the mind of the Committee. I hope to keep the House informed of further developments and progress with the setting up of this service as time goes on.
I now turn to Recommendation No. 3 and the question of appointments to the dockyards, particularly in the senior grades, from outside. Despite the persuasive arguments of the hon. Member for Widnes, I feel that there is little I can add to the full reply which the Admiralty gave to this recommendation. It is clear that what the Committee was aiming at was an assurance that we would not try to run the dockyards only with our own people who had spent their lives in our service, but that we should be prepared to appoint people when they have had service in similar capacities in private employment and who might bring a breath of fresh air into our work. As our replies show, I think, we have by no means neglected the recruitment of outside engineers including retired naval officers.
The need to build up the Admiralty Engineering Service will make this desirable, but I do not think we ought to make

a fetish of it and I would remind the House that there are substantial disadvantages in direct recruitment to senior managerial posts, disadvantages not least to the morale of people who have spent their lives slowly working up the ladder of promotion inside their Service. To take one example, the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, which is well known to the House, has few outlets outside Admiralty service and we rightly insist on very high academic capacity in the people we recruit to that Corps. The appointment of managers from outside must have some effect on recruitment.
What we have to achieve here is a proper balance. The House may, incidentally, be interested to know that the general manager (designate) at Portsmouth, whom I mentioned just now, is a retired naval officer, Captain Sparham. He has been appointed in a civilian capacity. I hope that these observations will weigh with the Committee.

Mr. MacColl: Our argument is based on the statement that the progress of reorganisation would be slackened because of the shortage of supervising staff in the more senior posts. That is why we proposed this. If it is not true, then the other point about bringing in people from outside is not nearly so important, but the origin of this recommendation was the statement, which we were given by the Admiralty, that there was a shortage of people.

Mr. Hay: I fully understood that, but I would ask the hon. Gentleman to bear in mind the other factors which I have just tried to mention. Of course, that is in our minds, but, as I said just now, one has to strike some sort of balance in these things and I think the balance that we have struck is about right.
Now let me say a word about the question of security of tenure for these officers. Again, it was mentioned by the Committee. I was interested to see that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East did not altogether approve. I do not think it was surprising for those who are dilettante in these matters that the Committee had some affection for this idea of comparatively long security of tenure, and that managers and deputy managers in the home dockyards ought to be appointed for at least five years in an individual dockyard. There was a similar reference


in the Report of the Committee on Admiralty Headquarters. As it happens, the reorganisation in the period 1958–61 led to an abnormally high turnover of managers, so it was not altogether surprising that the Committee picked the point up. Appendix I to the Report sets out the position, but I can now tell the House that in fact the situation is a little better.
As our replies showed, there are certain difficulties which we envisage in adopting the proposal of the Committee as a general rule. So far as deputy managers are concerned, where they are civilians they are appointed at superintending level and it is obviously desirable that, if they are to gain wide experience, they should be changed with reasonable frequency. I am afraid that we cannot commit ourselves to retaining them as long as five years in a single post when, with the turnover of managers, the chances of further promotion for any officer are smaller and he is generally near the end of his career, anyhow. So I think it is both more important and more convenient to have a lengthy stay in his position wherever possible but not to go beyond that.
There is another point, that some managers are serving naval officers who have reached the rank of captain. In due course, many of them will come forward for promotion to rear-admiral. To allow them thereafter to remain in post as rear-admirals so that they could complete their five years could lead to a rather odd chain of command in a reorganised dockyard, because there might be a rear-admiral superintendent supervising a civilian general manager who in turn supervises another rear-admiral as manager. I mention this to show the career problems here if we blindly accepted the Committee's proposals, but we are planning to try to ensure that naval captains in engineering departments should have up to four years in post. We are at one certainly with the Committee in desiring reasonable tenure of service and that is what we are really aiming at, and not to have chopping and changing. I hope the House will allow us to implement this in our own way.

Mr. Albu: I think the hon. Gentleman used a rather prejudiced word in talking about security of tenure.

Mr. Hay: No.

Mr. Albu: One can impart prejudice to one's words. It was not the view of the Committee. What the Committee was concerned with was that the members of a management team should be long enough together to create a common loyalty and a common attitude towards their job.

Mr. Hay: I apologise to the hon. Gentleman and to the House if I used the expression"security of tenure." Being a lawyer, I am afraid that such a phrase comes naturally to my lips. I can only say, to use another lawyer's expression, that if I said it, it was said without prejudice.
To turn to the recommendation about admiral superintendents. A large number of hon. Members have commented on this. I feel that there is, perhaps, some misunderstanding about the functions which an admiral superintendent performs. I think that some hon. Members may, perhaps, have felt that an admiral superintendent would generally become a fifth wheel to the coach, but I will emphasise that the admiral superintendent has a responsibility which goes very far beyond the dockyard itself and certainly very far beyond the refit or even construction of the ships and the service which they give to the fleet. He is responsible for co-ordinating activities of numerous depots in the area, which may cover stores, armament supply and victualling. None of these things comes directly within the purview of the general manager. The admiral superintendent is also responsible for movements of ships within the dockyard area. The admiral superintendent is concerned with the welfare of dockyard personnel and in many cases, as the Committee reminded us, some admiral superintendents even have appointments as flag officers.
If anyone wants to investigate the duties of an admiral superintendent at greater length I can only refer him, as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) did, to the answers to questions 789–98. There a very full explanation is given of what the job is.
Also it is interesting to examine what was said in paragraph 3 of the memorandum of the evidence submitted by the Admiralty to the Select Committee, but I honestly think that the post of admiral


superintendent in any dockyard ought not to be abolished just because the dockyard itself has been reorganised. One has to be clear that, apart from his rank, his duties are not the same as those of a general manager I may say in parenthesis that the general manager himself has a very heavy task to perform. If one were to accept the idea which lies in the Committee's suggestion, one would place upon the shoulders of the general manager, who may in many cases be a civilian, some of those purely maritime duties which are performed at present by an admiral superintendent I can tell the House that we are quite willing to view the relationship of admiral superintendent and general manager at each of the dockyards when we carry out the five-year reviews of reorganisation to which reference was made in our reply to the first recommendation from the Committee.
So far as the other problem relating to the chain of command is concerned—and, again, many hon. Members have spoken about this—I am, of course, still somewhat of a novice here, but I have learned enough in the last few weeks to know that the Fourth Sea Lord has many other functions as well as being vice-controller. He is, of course, concerned not just with dockyards but with the whole question of the supplies of the Navy and its transport, and I do not think in practice to have the chain of command which has been described and criticised in this debate is inefficient or ineffective.
Here again, the Admiralty is willing to consider the evidence and the facts, and if it were necessary or desirable to make changes, I have no doubt they would be made. But at the moment it seems to us that the chain of command does not blur responsibility and does not prevent decisions being taken, and also that it does not take too long for decisions to be passed down the chain; but if it were so, we should be willing to look at the matter again.
As time is running short, perhaps I may be forgiven for not going over all the other points. I should just like to say a word about external training, particularly the recommendations which the Committee made about the use of training institutions outside the naval service to which our dockyard people might

be sent. There is not much that I can add to the reply which the Admiralty gave to the recommendation. There are a number of external training institutions, although the Committee singled out only two of them for special mention. We make use of a number of these institutions for different purposes. We have a training section in the dockyard department headquarters, and one of the members of the section has the specific duty of keeping abreast of management training developments and of passing on information and advice to his colleagues and others.
The Committee, incidentally, also suggested that there ought to be wider visiting of other countries to compare the practices of individual dockyards. We do this. To give a couple of examples, the deputy director of the dockyards division and the general manager (designate) of Portsmouth visited Washington and the United States Navy shipyards last May, and the assistant director of management techniques, together with other officers, visited shipyards in Scandinavia, West Germany, Holland and France last winter.
The hon. Member for Edmonton asked about the training of professional engineers from the dockyards. I understand that a regular quota of ex-dockyard apprentices is trained in engineering at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, at which they take a university of London honours degree course or a professional certificate in naval architecture. Some others go off to other universities and return later to Admiralty service as professionally trained engineers. Therefore, I do not think we have anything particularly to reproach ourselves with on that score.
Wastage of apprentices is a matter which causes us, as it caused the Committee, some anxiety. It is a very difficult and perplexing problem for us. We accepted the recommendation of the Committee that we should inquire into it for the purpose of getting whatever facts are available. The House may like to know that we are following two lines of investigation. First, dockyards are giving us quarterly reports about the ex-apprentices who leave within two years of completing their apprenticeship. The first of these reports is in my hands now.
The second line—a somewhat novel one, in the Admiralty service at any rate—is to have investigations made by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. A psychologist will interview apprentices in all four dockyards to try to find out what are the underlying motives for their leaving the service—whether it is simply a question of pay or a question of advancement; in short, what is the motivating factor? I hope that we shall get some useful information about this in a few months' time.
Whatever the reason may be, I must point out the difficulty we are up against in trying to ensure that apprentices who have gone through their apprentice training with us remain in Admiralty service. At present about 43 per cent. are leaving us—a figure which is a little better than, but not much, the figure given by the Committee. It is quite out of the question in a modern industrialised society such as ours to try somehow to keep a legal tie on them. The old bond system, as the Secretary to the Admiralty said in reply to the hon. Member for Bristol, South, is no longer possible to operate. Nevertheless, we will find out, first of all, what the facts are, and then see whether there is some way in which we can deal with the matter.
I apologise to the hon. Member for Widnes, who, I think, wishes to claim the right of reply to the debate, for having gone on a little longer than I intended. Although I must disappoint a number of hon. Members by not covering more of the points they raised, nevertheless I think the House as a whole will agree that this has been an extremely useful debate and fully worthy of the debates that we have had on other Estimate Committee Reports. I look forward to giving the Estimates Committee any further information I can if there are points hon. Members have in mind which have not been touched on. I thank the Committee and its Chairman for the work which they have done.

6.55 p.m.

Mr. MacColl: I do not think that the Civil Lord need feel embarrassed about having taken a little more time than he intended, because I am sure that the House wanted much more to listen to him explaining what is happening than to me explaining what ought to happen.
The hon. Gentleman was kind enough to express appreciation of the work of the Sub-Committee and the main Estimates Committee. I would point out that this is, of course, a team operation in which the members of the Committee all play their part. The clerk, who has to steer us through the difficulties of drafting, has a very onerous responsibility. The final result represents a great deal of hard and fairly consistent slogging over the period of the investigation.
While thanks are being expressed, I should like to say, in that context, in view of what was said earlier in the debate, that we had nothing but the greatest possible courtesy and helpfulness from the Permanent Secretary to the Department. Once the inquiry began, we could not have had more complete and full help, and we all benefited very much from it.
I am glad that something is happening about the Admiralty engineering service. It ought to have happened some time ago. There has been delay. I think that the Treasury and the Admiralty ought to have been able to get together and reach some results more quickly.
There were two points on which there was substantial disagreement with the recommendations of the Committee. One was the question of appointing younger men to managerial positions. The hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Miss Vickers) rather chivalrously stuck up for the older men. By convention, a lady need never be more than 30, but, I, having last week passed my fifty-fifth birthday, was gratified to be told by the Admiralty that not all men are beginning to show diminished energy and vigour when they have passed their fiftieth birthday.
The point is that if we are to have rapidly developing new techniques—and I think that we shall do so in the world of naval repair and construction—we must have rapid technical adaptation to the problems; and I should have thought that that meant getting young men into positions of responsibility when they are in the full enthusiasm of their career. When talking about managers, the Civil Lord spoke of men getting to the end of their careers. Once one begins to feel that one is getting towards the end of


one's career, whether in politics or business, one begins to feel not really full-out for the future and rather inclined to coast along.
I think that there is a big issue of principle behind the questions of the tour of duty and the position of the admirals superintendent. We must make sure that the efficiency of this great industry is not subordinated to the needs of the Service. Both Front Bench speakers have said that the needs of the Service should not be ignored. I am afraid that if the needs of the industry are not kept in the forefront, the dockyards will be by-passed in the future; that, with the development of the amazing complexities of new work in ships, the dockyards will find themselves by-passed because they are regarded as being out of date in their ideas and organisation, and they will be lost. That is the great danger to which I referred earlier.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House takes note of the Ninth Report from the Estimates Committee in the last Session of Parliament and of the Fifth Special Report from the Estimates Committee relating to Her Majesty's Dockyards.

TEXTILE INDUSTRY

7.1 p.m.

Mr. Charles Fletcher-Cooke: I beg to move,
That this House recognises the disadvantages under which the United Kingdom textile industry at present labours, as compared with conditions enjoyed by textile industries in other countries of the world, and urges Her Majesty's Government to take all steps within its power to remove those disadvantages as soon as possible.
The very moderate Motion which I am moving refers to the United Kingdom textile industry and although I believe that all those who live by the loom, the frame and the spindle, should stick together, whatever the raw materials they use, I shall confine myself to the Lancashire end of this trade.
The cotton industry of Lancashire is not asking for public money; it is merely asking that the public money already invested in the industry shall not be wasted. We have had many debates, certainly in the twelve years that I have been in this House, on this subject. I should like, at the outset, to try to counter the

atmosphere that sometimes hangs over it, namely, that these debates of protest, which they almost always are, are merely the galvanic dying kicks of an industry which is on its last legs. It is rather as though the manufacturers of incandescent gas mantles, or of hansom cabs, or of something for which the demand has passed, are making their protests before they are carried to the grave. But textiles are not like that, although other industry sometimes find it useful to pretend they are. There is an enormous growth and ebullience in world trade in textiles. There is an enormous and growing demand for them, yet the world cradle of the industry here somehow gets less and less of this ever-increasing trade.
There is tremendous esteem still for our skill in this country. People come from all over the world to such places as the Shirley Institute to learn how we do it, yet in spite of our skill and our application we continue to find our trade both at home and abroad dwindling year by year.
My first point is to try to nail the theory that somehow there is some innate superiority in the metal-using industries, or something like that, and that they therefore must be protected at our expense. The reason that they are doing so well is that they are protected at our expense. They have confidence because their protection is so much better. Of course, if we protect one industry and not another the industry that is not protected has to bear the burden of the industries that are. They have to pay more for their vehicles because the vehicles are protected. I could elaborate that sort of position. Therefore, I should like to start off with the thesis, which, I hope, will not be denied, that there is a great future, and there can be an increasingly great future, for the United Kingdom textile industry if it is given a fair chance.
Sometimes we are asked,"Why do you grumble? The adaptability of the people of Lancashire is so great that they can turn their skills to other trades. Therefore, what is the worry?" Why it should be thrown in their faces in this way I am never quite sure. Anyhow, it involves an immense waste of skill when a population which has special skill is turned over rapidly to something for which it has no special qualifications.
What are the disadvantages of which I speak in my Motion? They are simply stated, but they have been long endured and they are getting worse. The only figure which I need quote about it—the figure speaks for itself—is that at present about 35 per cent. of our home market is taken up by imports, and the figure is growing, whereas our exports are increasingly blocked by other countries, notably recently by Commonwealth countries. No other country in the world takes anything like the percentage of imports from abroad that we take. Western Germany takes about 7 per cent., the United States of America about 5 per cent., Belgium and Holland, 2½ per cent., France 1 per cent., and no amount of example by us, no amount of adjuration, makes any difference to this sort of figure.
One thing which I should like to know is: how are the growth provisions in the long-term G.A.T.T. agreement actually working out—the provisions by which the countries that I have quoted have agreed to take an increasing number of imports—and what sort of force is being put behind the acceptance of that obligation by those other countries? So far as protection is provided by the long-term G.A.T.T. agreement, those countries are very ready to evoke it, and have done so. The United States of America has constantly evoked the disruption clauses and has constantly taken refuge in the categorisation of quota clauses which the long-term G.A.T.T. agreement allows, but we do not. We are still the soft underbelly of the world in this matter. We are getting softer, and I think that it is time we hardened up.
I believe that the time is ripe for new measures now. We have always previously been told—I will refer to the new measures in due course—to wait for some event or other, and it has been reasonable to make that request. We were told to await the outcome of the Common Market negotiations. That was a perfectly reasonable request because I believe that if we had succeeded in those negotiations we should, in the end, have achieved most of what we now have to achieve, but it will take three times as much pain to do it as it would have had the Common Market negotiations succeeded. Then we were told to wait for the recent G.A.T.T. meeting, and the

recent meeting of our Commonwealth Trade Ministers, and we were also told to wait to see the pattern of the reorganisation scheme. That, unfortunately, is now clear and rather gloomy. I shall have some words to say about that presently.
I should start by saying that as a result of this experience in recent years the United Kingdom cotton industry in all its parts is united as I have never known it in twelve years. For the first time I think that it can be said that every section of the industry is in agreement with what must be done. The different sections are not only agreed but I think that there is agreement between management and men. It is an industry totally united and free of strikes, yet it gets scant attention in our opinion.
The reorganisation scheme upon which such hopes were placed is coming to a crisis next week, the last date for the ordering of the new equipment. I think that originally about £115 million worth of applications were put in. To the best of my information—although it is difficult to find out what the true figure is—it will be well under 50 per cent. of that when the last date for ordering comes along. It is not surprising that there has been this great shortfall because already a growing amount of the machinery that was originally ordered, either under the scheme or immediately before it, is on the market, secondhand. It is said that there are more second-hand automatic looms on the market at present than there are looms in Lancashire. This cannot have been the intention of the scheme.
Here I put in a small plea for the finishing and dyeing end of the trade. It has had less time in which to make up its mind than, I think, any of the other sections of the industry, and it wants an extension of time not merely for paying for its new machinery, but for deciding whether to order it or not. That seems to me a reasonable although difficult request. The fact is that it has had less time than the spinners or weavers.
What can be done? Perhaps I may divide the suggestions into two. First, there are the immediate proposals. These are detailed and may sound small,


but, in the aggregate, I believe that they would give some confidence to the industry. I do not think that they come under any severe strictures either on the grounds that we should be breaking our word—which, of course, we must not do—or that they would provoke retaliation. They are things which other countries have done, and which are accepted and which have, as far as I know, not provoked any retaliation upon those countries.
The first, and perhaps the most important, concerns anti-dumping. I am not in favour of export devices, although I know that some of my hon. Friends are. But I am very much in favour of a much quicker, more efficient and more ruthless smelling out and exposing of export devices by other people. I believe that this should become the direct, active responsibility of the Board of Trade.
Somehow or other, the Board of Trade for some reason seems to constitute itself as an advocate of the foreigner—or so people in the industry often think. I certainly believe that it should be the responsibility of the Department to smell out such things as differential price agreements, and other devices which are well known, on behalf of the industry for which it is the trustee. It should not constitute itself, no doubt with the best intentions, as the critic of the industry when the industry tries, with the limited resources at its disposal, to find out these things which are, of course, very often concealed.
At present, there are great delays in the machinery. This is not a complaint which is confined to the cotton industry, but to many others as well. But it hits the cotton industry in particular because of its delicate state. At present, for example, I believe that it is necessary to show the deleterious effect of a single shipment, and that, of course, is an almost impossible thing to prove because the effect of continually dumped shipments is cumulative. It cannot be said that any particular shipment is the one which has disrupted the industry.
A great deal of time is taken up in trying to discover what I think could be discovered fairly quickly. For instance, there is the well-known story that in India domestic prices are about 30 per cent. above the prices at which that

country sells to this country. Another example is the story—I do not know whether it is true—that Canada, now buys her quota of Hong Kong cotton, sells it on the domestic market at her own domestic price, and then sells her own cloth to this country at what one might call the Hong Kong price. I am telescoping a rather complicated series of transactions, but that is the effect.

Mr. Leslie Hale: The hon. and learned Gentleman is telescoping the time factor as well. All these facts were before the Government ten years ago. I have submitted samples of cloth which have been sent to Africa, exported at prices which were below the prices we were paying for our cotton for spinning. The hon. and learned Member says that this has taken a long time to find out, but it was known then. We have pressed the Government for ten years to do something. All that happened was that the hon. and learned Gentleman joined the Government and rather shut himself up for that period.

Sir Arthur Vere Harvey: Examples have been given to successive Governments for about seventeen years. Will my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) press the President of the Board of Trade to pay more sympathetic consideration to individual complaints from the industry and use them collectively?

Mr. Fletcher-Cooke: Perhaps I may make a modest reply to these criticisms.
These examples could not have been given ten years ago, but no doubt there were others. I do not think that the Indian or Canadian examples I have mentioned were known earlier, because I understand that this situation has not been going on for more than two years in Canada. There may be other examples and no doubt the hon. Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Hale), who knows a great deal about this, will give them if he is called to speak.
I have no doubt that Canada would be the first to take severe action if we started dumping there—and I would not blame her. She has a strong system of current domestic value certificates, by which each consignment into Canada has to bear a statement of current domestic value, and she insists, quite rightly, on the right to inspect markets


and conditions in the exporting country to see whether it is a fair certificate or not. She simply will not allow a consignment in unless the certificate is in order.
We have nothing like that at all, and it is known that we have not. I think that it would be much better if nobody had anything like it. But I do not think that exhortations, even in the powerful manner which the Minister of State used to Canadians the other day, really will make very much difference.
The second factor is the slackness—perhaps I should call it weakness—of our anti-dumping legislation, which allows the manipulation of raw material prices. I think that this is fairly well known and I will not expand my speech by going into detail on it, but it is clear that in many cases raw material prices are manipulated to form dumping operations. Thus, anti-dumping really is the first thing that we must see to.
If we are to go in for a system of tariffs and quotas—as, indeed, we have done—we must not let that system get the worst of all worlds by not enforcing it—and not enforcing it in a reasonable way. Secondly—and this is technical, although a great many Members will have been given a great deal of ammunition on it recently—there is the categorisation of quotas.
If there is a case for protecting our industry by quotas at all, then there must be a case for making the quotas effective. If the point of quotas is that the industry shall not be destroyed by sudden and unexpected waves of imports, then the same must be said for any particular section of that industry.
It is, I think, well known that at present there is a practice in many of the countries which send textile goods to us of concentrating first on one part of the industry here, hoping to knock it out, and then on another part, and so on, until every section has been destroyed. Indeed, there is said to be in Hong Kong an organisation with the principal object of steering within the quota allowed more sophisticated made-up articles for consignment to this country.
They go first from shirts to, perhaps, overalls, and then from overalls to raincoat poplins, or whatever it may be. One

after another a target is selected, which it is hoped to knock out. There must be an end to this. All the other importing countries insist on categorisation, and, except for the difficulties of administration—which, I agree, would be great—I cannot understand why we should not adopt the same practice.
The third thing that we should do immediately is to stop the carry-over of quotas. I know that this practice, of allowing people who do not fill their quota one year to carry it over into some months of the next, was agreed by the industry at one time. But when the industry negotiated these agreements it was negotiating with no ammunition, and often against a deadline of time. It had to do its best, and it did extremely well, without anything behind it in the way of a sanction. Therefore, it is not now fair to throw that fact in its face and to say,"After all, you agreed to this." The industry was negotiating from extreme weakness.
The effect of carry-over is that, by clever means of allocating quotas, in the first few months of any year all the new orders are set against the unfilled quota of the previous year. The result is that any increase in the trade goes not to the home industry, but abroad. In Pakistan, for instance, in the first quarter of this year, imports of cotton piece goods into this country, including made-up goods, were far in excess of the ceiling. Indeed, I am not sure that they were not in excess of the carry-over of last year. Obviously, they could not have got where they were but for the carry-over.
Again, Formosa has already exceeded its ceiling in the first quarter of this year by means of carry-over from last year's quota. This is a very great hole which must be stopped up.

Mr. J. A. Leavey: My hon. and learned Friend said that the last two interventions in his speech were welcome. Perhaps this will also prove to be. Is he aware that new quotas are being continually offered? Recently, Malaya was given a quota of 5 million sq. yds., although I believe that she has only one cotton mill, with about 200 or 300 looms, which would seem out of keeping with that quota.

Mr. Fletcher-Cooke: I am sure that my hon. Friend is right, as he always is


about matters connected with the cotton industry. I shall return to the point of new quotas for new countries.
The fourth thing that must be done immediately concerns the question of Commonwealth content. Only 25 per cent. of value needs to be added to goods for them to be able to come into this country as Commonwealth goods, or as goods from Eire. We are told that goods of Asiatic origin are flooding into Eire, having 25 per cent. added to the value, in the form of finishing, and then coming here. This makes nonsense of the quotas which have been so laboriously negotiated.
The quotas themselves are often in the form of inter-industry agreements. They are not nearly tight enough in their administration. I do not blame the industry altogether, because, as I said, it had to negotiate from extreme weakness, but the situation seems to be extraordinarily vague. There is now a dispute with India about whether the Indians should be allowed to concentrate on the finer end of the trade—made-up goods, and so on. It is said that in the agreement negotiated the two sides"agreed to consult in respect of an undue distortion of the well-defined pattern of trade."
That is a very loose phrase. I do not altogether blame the Indians for saying that it obligates them to exactly nothing. An agreement to consult, or an agreement to agree, imposes no obvious obligation whatever, as any lawyer knows. I have no doubt that when businessmen make these agreements they think that they are binding people in certain directions. If these inter-industry agreements, which I deprecate, are to continue in future they need to be much more closely drafted, and drafted with a great deal more foresight as to the future.
It is true to point out that the looseness of these agreements can work both ways. I therefore adjure the authorities to take full advantage of any ambiguities in our favour. There is usually no arbitration clause in these agreements, and we therefore have the whip hand, in the sense that we can simply refuse to allow the goods in in case of dispute, pending a decision. I would not regard that as conflicting with one obligation that we must observe, namely, not to break our word.
So much for the short-term proposals, which would be of immense value. As for the long-term proposals, my right hon. Friend has said that a ring fence now exists around Lancashire. At least, I believe that he said that. A ring implies a continuous circle, but as far as I can see the protection is no more than a few widely dispersed and rather low hurdles, with a great many gaps between them. The reason is that each country is treated piecemeal, as my hon. Friend pointed out in referring to Malaya. Every time one source is stopped up there is an immediate flood from sources which have no ring fence near them. They establish within twelve months a large market, and then seem to have the right to a quota although they have no traditional trade with this country in cotton goods. From where they get the right I do not know.
Yugoslavia, with no traditional textile trade with this country, has been given a quota of 5 million sq. yds. Where will it be next? Will it be Israel, or West Africa? Where shall we find the flood coming from next? We must have a global policy in this matter. We must not operate a country-by-country policy. I am not saying that every country should be treated the same, because we have obligations, both in Europe and to the Commonwealth, which rightly prevent us treating each country the same. But every country must be dealt with. There is room for a Commonwealth agreement, provided that it is fully reciprocal, and there is certainly room for E.F.T.A. arrangements.
To all those people in the cotton industry who come to see me I say that they must put up with imports from Portugal and other European countries, provided that they are fair and that there is no dumping, or any other dodges. That is one reason why I am so anxious that we should police the dumping provisions more effectively. There is nothing in the E.F.T.A. arrangements or anywhere else that prevents us from relying on the long-term G.A.T.T. agreement, by which severe disruption can be treated as exceptional.
The fundamental difficulty of any new policy arises from the tradition of Commonwealth free entry. I do not believe that the Commonwealth depends on free entry; I believe that it depends on reciprocal arrangements which are fair to


both sides. For example, since 1959 Canada has been a net exporter of textiles to the United Kingdom. There is no duty on them here. But we have to pay 12½ per cent. to 25 per cent. duty on our textiles going to Canada, and with the stringent anti-dumping provisions I have mentioned. Where is the reciprocity about that? That seems to me something as between, I will not say underdeveloped countries—it is more like overdeveloped countries—which is quite wrong. There are historical reasons for it, but I think that the matter must be renegotiated.
We are always told, whenever we point out that with members of the Commonwealth free entry has been reached, that historical reasons exist for it. I notice opposite the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. O'Malley), who is interested in the musical instrument industry. I was very interested in the reply which he received recently to a Question to, I think, the Minister of State, Board of Trade, when he was told that there was a tax on musical instruments coming from Commonwealth countries. Why is it that musicial instruments, the English musical instrument industry—undoubtedly it is an admirable industry—should have this protection, while to suggest that the textile industry should have it—I think that raiment is more important than sound—would be a most deplorable breach of some fundamental ideology and we cannot contemplate it.
It applies nearer home than that. We are told that for historical reasons there can be protection for man-made fibres, but none for natural fibres. Who is to be master, man or history?"Historical reasons" is a strange philosophy, for everything that happens is historical. The only question is whether one wishes to change it or keep it. One cannot say that because it is historical it is necessarily there for all time. There is no underlying philosophy in Commonwealth policy at the moment and I think that there must be one.
The Australian tariff against us is now enormous, and our preference there dwindles every day because it is expressed in pence and not ad valorem. I think that I am right in saying that. Certainly, some preferences are expressed in terms of pounds, shillings and pence

and not ad valorem. My hon. Friend may say that I am wrong about it and if so I take his word for it. Since the Common Market negotiations it is not possible to return to the old sacred view of Commonwealth free entry. We should have to do something about it then. Although it would be far harder to do so, we must do something now. I do not wish to equate the Commonwealth countries with foreign countries. But the balance of disadvantage against this country from Commonwealth free imports is too much to be borne.
I wish to ask—I am sure that we shall be told—what is the policy of the Labour Party in this connection. Some years ago there was a suggestion by the now Leader of the Opposition of an import board—"The Wilson plan". We should like to know whether that is still the policy of the Labour Party. It seems to me that it suffers from two great disadvantages. It is a cleft stick. If it is to give protection, why cannot the protection be given straight? If it is not to give protection, what is the point of a new bureaucratic machine? When that riddle is answered perhaps we can consider what is the policy of the party opposite.
I am delighted to see that my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade is in the Chamber. It is very good of him to attend, as I know that he has had to cancel a most important engagement to be here. After his visit to Lancashire on 14th June my right hon. Friend will be in no doubt about the feeling in the industry and particularly among the members of the Cotton Board. Sometimes hard things have been said about the Cotton Board. But there is no doubt that under a succession of Presidents and Directors-General, Lord Rochdale, Mr. Roston, and perhaps I might add Sir Cuthbert Clegg, the Board is fighting for the cotton industry as well as and quite as fully and strongly as any body could. The Board is by no means composed of Government"stooges" as one sometimes hears them unfairly called.
The cyclical upturn of trade which I think we all hope for has not materialised, although it is due. Why is that? I think that the reason is partly outside our control because it is due partly to the weather. It is also due to the fact that such advantages as there are still


on our present system undoubtedly go not to our own people, but abroad. Meanwhile, this great industry is being of no advantage to the Government. I would have thought that since so much public money is invested in the industry, and since it has reserves of taxable capacity in which the Treasury should be very interested, the Government would do more to protect what in both sense is one of their investments because this year the Treasury will have to pay out on losses in the industry rather than collect taxes as it might have hoped to do.
These are new circumstances. The time has now come when it is impossible to say that we should wait for this or that—wait for the Common Market, or the G.A.T.T., or the Commonwealth Trade Ministers. In these new circumstances it is time to do not merely the things which I have suggested should be done immediately, but to take a look at the industry in its global setting and to dictate what will be its future and what it can expect, because only that can make it flourish as it should.

7.37 p.m.

Mr. F. Blackburn: I wish to congratulate the hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) first upon his luck in the Ballot and secondly upon his choice of subject. I am in general agreement with what he said. He will not have very much longer to wait to learn the details of the Labour Party programme. I think that most hon. Members who represent constituencies concerned with the textile industry would be in general agreement with what the hon. and learned Gentleman has said. I wish I could feel as convinced that, were there a vote, they would all be found in the same Lobby.
It is about 12 months since we had the last debate on the cotton industry and I think it very important that we should again be considering the industry. What has happened in those 12 months? As everyone knows, there have been further closures. Unfortunately some have occurred in my constituency. When these mills are closed we get no help from the Board of Trade for the provisions of new industries for our areas. The President of the Board of Trade excuses himself on the ground that the level

of unemployment is not as high there as in some other parts of the country; but the right hon. Gentleman knows as well as anyone that the present figures for unemployment do not reflect the true position because so many women in the textile industry were not insured in their own right. They have been lost to the industry, and we know that there has been a great depopulation of some of our areas. Surely it is not in the interests of the country that our areas should be depopulated and our people go to other parts of the country which are already over-crowded.
During the last debate the position was described as a crisis of confidence. Is there any greater confidence in the industry today? I am afraid that the answer to that question is definitely"No". There is no other cotton industry in the world which has to face such difficulties as ours, nor is there any other large British industry which has to face competition on the same scale as that faced by the cotton industry. Other Governments are prepared to help their textile industries much more effectively than our Government are.
Our Government have been pumping money into the industry, on the one hand, and undermining the industry, on the other, by allowing still larger and larger imports. At present, as the hon. Member for Darwen said, the level of imports is about 35 per cent. of home consumption. When we compare that with the figures for other countries we see what a great burden our industry carries. In 1959 it was 23 per cent. of home consumption. That was the figure for imports which we pressed upon the President of the Board of Trade in last year's debate and which he rejected.
On the question of pumping money into the industry, I want to make one quotation from an article by Andrew Alexander which appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 24th May. He said this about the Government's reorganisation scheme:
In brief, the whole aid scheme would have been fine for an industry which was assured of a good future, but very short of capital reserves. But, in fact, the position in Lancashire was exactly the reverse of this—though the industry could scarcely be blamed for thinking at the time that the Government meant to look after its investment of public money in the cotton trade.


We all agree that it is vastly important that a country such as ours should help the underdeveloped countries. That is a concept with which we all agree. We are all anxious to play our part. I should now like to pose a question which I put in last year's debate: who decided that the best way to help underdeveloped countries was by killing our own industry? The more development takes place here the more we are in a position to help underdeveloped countries.
I am very eager to develop Commonwealth trade, but surely that trade must follow a sensible pattern. To ruin our own industry does not seem to me to fall within that description. Would it not have been more sensible for the main outlet for cheap Asian textiles to be to the poorer countries with a lower standard of living? That is not happening. They are sent to England. The attitude is—"We can get there without any difficulty. There is a free market there." The Board of Trade should be looking after us a little better than it is.
As a corollary of our receiving such large quantities of duty-free imports, have we not the right to expect fair trading practices from those who enter our market? The hon. and learned Member for Darwen mentioned certain of these matters. India places a duty on exports of raw cotton, gives an incentive for exports of cotton goods, and places a duty on imports. Pakistan has a duty on raw cotton exports. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the question of Ireland providing a back-door entry for still more cheap textiles. Providing that 25 per cent. of value is added to them, as they are made up in the Republic they can enter Britain on Commonwealth preference terms.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned Canada. Can the Government confirm or deny the position with regard to Canada? I understand that Canada produces certain cloth at 1s. 10d. a yard, and, as such, it would not normally be competitive with the British product. Hong Kong is producing the same cloth at 1s. 5¾d. a yard. A Canadian company therefore imports Hong Kong cloth which it sells to its own customers at 1s. 10d. a yard but sends its own cloth to Britain to sell at just over 1s. 5¾d. a yard. That is the information we have. It is very

important that the President of the Board of Trade should either confirm or deny it.
If we cannot make better agreements with India, Pakistan and Hong Kong because of the Ottawa Agreements, what will be the position with all the new emerging self-governing countries of the Commonwealth? Surely they will have exactly the same rights to come into our market. That would be the final nail in the coffin. It is no good the President of the Board of Trade saying that he has put a ring round Lancashire or round the cotton industry. Whatever ring he has put there is invisible. Mention has already been made of two new entrants into the British market—Malaya and Yugoslavia.
The Government were willing to throw over the Commonwealth in order to crawl into the Common Market, but they are not willing—this seems strange to me—to take effective action to save our own industry.

Mr. Hale: May I add that the Government have told us for 10 years that the Congo Basin Treaties are of such constitutional importance that we cannot possibly vary import terms in Africa? Since then they have been offering to give away the coastal strip in Kenya to redistribute boundaries, and to reallocate the territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar, and the new Government of Kenya are now talking about a Common Market of East Africa, including the Congo. Yet we have been told that constitutional treaties prevent imports from Japan, Hong Kong, and so on, into the whole of East Africa being subjected to any regulation.

Mr. Blackburn: My hon. Friend has just confirmed the point I was making. As I said earlier, no other cotton industry has to face such difficulties as ours. I wonder why there are no wholesale closures in the Common Market countries. The answer is that the total level of Asian imports and cheap textiles is only 2 per cent. of home consumption. It is true that under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade E.E.C. undertakes to increase its share of cheap imports from Asia, but this will raise the figure only to about 4 per cent. of home consumption.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the United States imports about 5 per cent.


of its home consumption, yet she has already taken over 70 effective actions under the G.A.T.T. long-term arrangement against 17 different countries, whilst this country appears to be reluctant to take any action at all.
I should like to say something about re-equipment machinery, but since I have written to the President of the Board of Trade about a specific case I think that it would be wiser to await his reply. I do not want to detain the House long, because I know that many Members wish to speak. I want to mention briefly a few things which I think the Government ought to do. Knowing this Government, I know that it is no use suggesting to them they ought to have any control over merchanting. Yet we must remember that the people who are importing these cheap textiles into this country are our own people.
Leaving that aside, I suggest to the President of the Board of Trade, first, that a Commonwealth conference specifically on the problem of textiles should immediately be called. Secondly, new agreements should be negotiated at Government level. It should not be left to the industry to try to come to some arrangement with industries in other countries. Thirdly, they should fix six-monthly quotas with no carry-over of unexpired balances of quotas or ceilings. Fourthly, they should negotiate agreements on the basis of classification of imports, or what the industry calls categorisation.
Fifthly, effect should be given to the President's words that countries with no traditional trade in cotton and textiles should not count on being able to build up a new market in Britain. The right hon. Gentleman will agree that effect has certainly not been given to his words on this subject. Sixthly, they should adopt more effective methods of dealing with dumping by using the American and Canadian systems, which require the exporter to indicate on his invoice not only the ceiling price but also the current domestic value of the goods, and make any necessary adjustments, as they do. Seventhly, let the Government be as active in defence of our industry as other Governments are in defence of theirs—and that includes readiness to take effective action under the G.A.T.T. long-term arrangements.
As I said earlier, the last debate we had on this subject revealed a general lack of confidence. Unless we can see the Government effectively doing something, that lack of confidence will remain. Unless the Government take action the cotton industry is bound to continue to suffer.

7.51 p.m.

Mr. John C. Bidgood: Not very much new can be said in a debate of this kind. Hon. Members who are interested in Lancashire's problems have from time to time reiterated the various points that have been made this evening. I do not think it possible for my right hon. Friend to query the terms of the Motion, for no fair-minded person can quarrel with the way in which it is worded.
There is no doubt that the Lancashire cotton industry has taken a terrific hiding during the last ten years. We know that the taxpayer has poured vast sums of money into the industry—yet we are still going through that same difficult period that we have been going through for a decade, namely, a crisis of confidence that seems to have got worse instead of better. Although the industry has been streamlined, company results now coming out are showing very little improvement. From what one can see, there is little hope that conditions will be better next year.
One of the basic reasons for the difficulties confronting the industry is the question of cheap Asian imports. The first thing the Government must do is to settle without delay the future level of quotas from India, Pakistan and Hong Kong and not leave it, as has been suggested, to the industry to negotiate its own agreements. A clear decision devolves on the Government to take the initiative in this matter and I am sure that the industry would agree that any revision of the quotas must be in a downward direction.
We have heard this afternoon—and I support this—that the next quotas must be categorised. This is one of the principal complaints that the industry is now making. We have also heard that there must be no carry-over of quotas in any future arrangements. I feel it only fair to say that if, as has happened over the last two years, importers of


cheap Asian goods have found it necessary to carry over their quotas, trade must have been very bad indeed in this country, if only because the Asian producers were not able to sell their full quotas here.
One-third of the consumption of cotton textiles in this country is imported. I am sure from what I have heard that the industry is united in the view that the Government must do something to come to its rescue. I do not believe that it should be left to the industry to provide my right hon. Friend with examples of dumping. There must be within his Department facilities to enable him to come to a conclusion on the evidence available as to whether or not goods are being dumped here at give-away prices.
We are told that the domestic price of cotton textiles in India is 30 per cent. above the price at which they are sold in the United Kingdom. While hon. Members and those engaged in the industry may or may not have conclusive evidence to bring before my right hon. Friend, I am fairly certain that in his Department there must be conclusive proof as to whether or not dumping of this sort is taking place.
The cotton industry has altered its character very much in the last few years. Whereas it used to be a labour-intensive industry it is now a capital-intensive one. There are some efficient firms in which the capital expenditure per employee is as much as £8,000, which is higher than that in the motor trade. On the other hand, looking at the other side of the coin, productivity and prices in the cotton industry are not as good as they should be. We need not seek far for the reasons. They are, first, because the industry is horizontal instead of vertical and, secondly, because of the difficulty—shall we say antipathy?—of going over to the three-shift system which operates in the Asian countries and also among our European competitors.
The position is not helped by the attitude of the trade unions, which are asking for large premiums on shift-working and on working new machinery. Whereas it is possible to try to draw up a balance sheet as to which side of industry may or may not be

wrong, the fact remains that the industry itself, both employers and employees, is united in thinking that the Government must do something, and very quickly. The industry is certain, as must be every reasonable hon. Member, that Commonwealth countries should not be allowed to push up tariffs against British textiles with impunity.
There is much the Government and industry can do in this connection but, as I said, the first thing that the Government must do is to restore the confidence of the Lancashire textile industry in itself. One of the criticisms against the Government is that their attitude to Lancashire textiles is not crystal clear. What is crystal clear is the attitude of Lancashire towards the Government. All the Motion seeks to do is to give the industry an opportunity to operate under the same advantages as the cotton industries of other countries, and the United States and Canada have been quoted as examples. I could quote countless other examples.
It is a great credit to this House of Commons that on this absorbing subject so many hon. Members, regardless of party affiliations, have sensitive and sensible views about what should be done. We have a clear conscience over the Lancashire textile industry—and by"clear conscience" I do not mean the conscience of the Government but the conscience of individual hon. Members, who feel that something must be done, and without delay, to try to retrieve the injustices under which this industry is labouring. I have the greatest pleasure in supporting the Motion.

8.0 p.m.

Mr. Ernest Thornton: We are all grateful to the hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) for tabling this Motion, and for the cogent way in which he has highlighted the unfair treatment meted out to the cotton textile industry. He will, I know, forgive me if I say that none of his arguments, or mine, will be new to the President of the Board of Trade. The right hon. Gentleman has consistently and repeatedly rejected suggestions put to him by the trade, and by this side of the House in particular, for fairer treatment of this important industry.
The Government's policy towards this once very great industry has clearly


failed, and I doubt whether one person on either the employers' or the workers' side has a good word to say for it. During the last 10 years, the Opposition have on many occasions challenged the Government on the failure of their textile industry policy. The Government's main effort was made just prior to the 1959 General Election, when they rushed through the Cotton Industry Act, 1959. We then pointed out that unless the volume of imports was realistically and reasonably tackled, confidence would not be restored and adequate re-equipment would not take place.
The warning contained in the Report of the Estimates Committee last year has been proved correct. It said:
…failing a speedy and satisfactory solution to the related problems of imports, marketing and the fuller use of plant and machinery, much of the expenditure incurred"—
under the Cotton Industry Act, 1959—
will have been to no purpose.
On 28th June, 1962, the Opposition tabled a Motion taking note of the Select Committee's Report and calling on the Government
…to take positive steps without delay to promote the stability and prosperity of this important industry.
What was the Governments reply? It was to table an Amendment inviting the House to welcome:
…the assurances on import policy contained in the Government statement of 6th June as providing the basis upon which the cotton textile industry can work for future efficiency, stability and well being within a prosperous national economy."—[Official Report, 28th June, 1962; Vol. 661, c. 1367–1377.]

Mr. Dan Jones: Since when, the industry has gone from bad to worse.

Mr. Thornton: The Government have certainly not provided the"prosperous national economy". In fact, in the meantime, the economy has nearly gone bust, and a few months ago we had the highest level of unemployment for many years. It is equally clear that the Government's statement on import policy has failed, and failed badly, to provide the basis referred to.
I agree at once that the industry is not free from fault. To take one of the three related points mentioned by the Estimates Committee—marketing—the industry has moved all too slowly towards

integrating the production processes with the marketing arrangements. It is true that there has been some perceptible movement in recent weeks but, in the main, it has been the merging of firms that already have their own marketing sections. The spinning processes, dominated by the Lancashire Cotton Corporation, the Fine Spinners and Doublers Association and Combined English Mills, remains predominantly horizontal in structure. A break through here should be organised.
I do not suggest that vertical integration is the answer to all the problems—it is not. The probability is that, from the point of view of production costs, the difference is only marginal, but it is a necessary contribution if this problem of orderly marketing and the ironing out of booms and slumps is to be solved. In recent years, of course, it has been all slumps and no booms.
With regard to the other two related problems referred to by the Estimates Committee—imports and the fuller use of plant and machinery—the fault clearly lies outside the industry's control. In the last year or two, the relationship of imports to domestic production has meant that many efficient producing firms operating a two-and three-shift system have had to knock off one shift because of shortage of orders—and a few have gone out of business altogether. I particularly call the attention of the hon. Member for Bury and Radcliffe (Mr. Bidgood) to this point.
We really have cause to worry, cause to say that something is seriously wrong with the industry's opportunities. When our most efficient firms, operating on a three-shift system—and our efficient firms are as good as any in the world—cannot keep their plant running because the markets are not there for the long runs necessary for this highly-productive machinery, there is something seriously wrong with the conditions under which the industry has to operate.
As the Estimates Committee pointed out, there was a crisis of confidence in the industry, and since the issue of the Estimates Committee's Report the Government have done nothing at all to restore that confidence. That lack of confidence is high-lighted by the almost certain failure of the re-equipment phase of the Cotton Industry, Act, 1959. If


that Act does not succeed in getting substantial re-equipment it has failed completely, and a lot of public money has gone down the drain.
Much has been said about the damaging effect of the large volume of cheap-price imports. The United Kingdom was once the world's largest exporter of cotton textile goods—it is now easily the world's largest importer of those goods. The United States of America, with three and a half times our population and probably seven or eight times our purchasing power, imports, quantitatively, only about two-thirds of the cotton textiles that the United Kingdom imports.
The difference is not due to efficiency, but mainly due to restriction of entry. As has been pointed out by the hon. and learned Member for Darwen and other hon. Members, the United Kingdom proportion of imports to domestic requirements has varied in recent years from 25 per cent. to 40 per cent., whereas in the United States the figure is 5 per cent. or 6 per cent. No other industrial country—with, perhaps, the exception of Sweden, with its 7½ million population—approaches anything like the United Kingdom proportion.
Our present system of uncontrolled imports under ceilings for individual countries, Commonwealth and others, is clearly unsatisfactory. I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Darwen. There is price disruption, inability to book long runs, which are so essential with highly productive, new and expensive plant, and there is absence of adequate categorisation. All these three problems are interlinked. We on this side of the House, and doubtless hon. Members opposite, met representatives of the industry this afternoon. The picture that emerged was certainly one of chaos in the industry, in marketing, in the back-door entries, and the rest. There is a clear need for adequate machinery for planning, categorising and timing these large imports.
We have to accept substantial imports, for a variety of reasons, not least the needs of developing countries such as India and Pakistan. I freely admit this, but why cannot we control imports more effectively so that they do the minimum

of damage instead of very nearly the maximum damage as is now the case? The United States does it and Switzerland does it by different means. Other countries do it as well. If all other countries take steps to prevent disruption, when they have only a low percentage of imports, how much more important is it that we should take these steps with our relatively much higher percentage of imports?
Within the framework of an outward-looking trade policy which a great trading nation like ours should pursue, there is much that the Government can and should do. All the countries represented at the recent G.A.T.T. long-term cotton textile arrangements, importing and exporting nations alike, recognised and wrote into the document recognition that the United Kingdom was saturated with cotton textile imports.
The present ceilings on imports are too high but they have been accepted up to 1965, notwithstanding protests from this side of the House in June of last year against the last increase that was made. An assurance should be given to the industry that limitation will continue after 1965. The limitation should be global, as suggested by the hon. and learned Member for Darwen. If new exporters gain markets here and some of the existing exporters increase their share, others must lose out, at least until such time as other advanced countries come near to matching our United Kingdom performance. Special regard, however, should be given to India and Pakistan. They have tremendous problems, including a serious balance of payments problem. But this does not apply to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is not a poor Colony. It has no balance of payments problem. I agree that it has other problems. The hardship among the population of Hong Kong could be ameliorated by having a reasonable taxation system. Why should the extremely wealthy people in Hong Kong—European, British and Chinese—get away with such a low level of direct taxation?
A great deal has been said already about the issues of categories, trade distortion, and quota periods. I would only add on the last named subject that Hong Kong did not have a carry-over last year.


It had a carry-over in the preceding year of 10 million sq. yards. I understand that this year India has a carry-over of 37 million sq. yards. Pakistan has a carry-over of 6 million sq, yards and Formosa one of 1 million sq. yards. I understand that India's 37 million sq. yards carry-over has already been delivered in this country. It would appear, therefore, that in 1963 we shall have from India 232 million sq. yards compared with 195 million sq. yards. Is it surprising that in those circumstances the industry in Lancashire remains depressed and that the upturn has not come about? Is it surprising that prices remain disruptively low and that confidence is at a record low ebb?
Another point to which reference has already been made and which ought to be emphasised is the need to redefine Commonwealth goods. Enough has been said on this subject. I do not want to go into further details, but there is a point to which I should like to draw the attention of the President of the Board of Trade. The right hon. Gentleman should have a further look at the provision for an automatic increase in allowable imports when the average order book in the Lancashire industry reaches 15 weeks. An order book of 15 weeks is not unreasonably long. In saying this I do not deny the fairness of making some provision of this kind, because excessively long order books are not good in the long run.
The Government have clearly failed the industry. The suspicion has long existed in Lancashire that the industry was expendable. That suspicion is now a near certainty. Why does every other advanced industrialised country consider its cotton textile industry an important part of the economy? Why have this Government done so much to create conditions for the industry which make it increasingly impossible for it to survive? We warned the Government when the"scrapping" phase of the Cotton Industry Act, 1959, seemed so successful that unless they created confidence on this import issue the re-equipment phase would fail and much public money would have been wasted. This is happening, if it has not already happened.
The hon. and learned Member for Darwen asked what the Labour Party

would do. I think that from the way he put the question he already accepts that it will be a Labour Government that will have to resolve these problems. When the Labour Party comes into power, which cannot be long delayed now, a real attempt will be made to establish conditions of fairness and to restore confidence to the Lancashire industry.
A Labour Government will reopen negotiations at G.A.T.T. and seek to secure an early and substantial liberalisation in the 1962 Agreement. The broad principle of that Agreement, of a 5 per cent. per annum increase in imports seems generous in itself. It is in fact a high rate of increase but, of course, it starts from a ridiculously low rate. It will be 10 years before a real contribution is made to the problem of the needs of the developing countries for cotton textiles, assuming that the scheme is implemented and works successfully. These developing countries cannot afford to wait 10 years. It would be far better for all concerned to have an immediate substantial uplift in imports by the developed countries followed by a 2 per cent. per year rate of increase instead of the 5 per cent. on the very low base.
A Labour Government will establish machinery to bring order out of the present chaos, to regulate the imports of cotton goods into the United Kingdom. The present high level to which we are committed to the end of 1965 will be handled in such a way as to minimise price disruption and iron out the ups and downs of supply and demand which have been a bugbear to the industry for years. Further integration will be encouraged by financial grants for modernisation in those firms which undertake approved integration schemes.
A Labour Government will demonstrate that with order and planning it is possible to maintain a viable cotton textile industry without damaging the economies of the developing Commonwealth countries. Orderly adjustments have been achieved with agriculture and coal. It can be done with cotton if there is the will to do it.
The statement of policy, which will be made in full by my right hon. Friend the Deputy-Leader of the Opposition in Manchester on 19th July, will, I feel


sure, go a long way to restore the confidence which the present Government have so lamentably failed to create.

8.22 p.m.

Sir John Barlow: Many Members wish to speak on this important subject tonight, and, for that reason, I shall try to curtail my remarks. So many Members obviously wish to say very much the same thing, and therefore one should shorten one's speech.
I am very glad to follow the hon. Member for Farnworth (Mr. Thornton). We in the industry have a great respect for his knowledge of the cotton industry and, while I do not always agree with him, I always take what he says about the cotton industry with very great seriousness.

Mr. D. Jones: I wish the President of the Board of Trade did.

Sir J. Barlow: So do I. The cotton industry, the oldest great industry in this country, has been the best organised and the most economic in its day and has provided relatively more exports than any other industry in this country at any other time. People nowadays so often fail to remember the size of the industry about 50 years ago, when it was producing something like 8,000 million yards of cloth a year of which it was exporting nearly four-fifths. The present production of the cotton industry is, I imagine, in the region of 1,200 million yards of cloth a year, which is approximately one-seventh of what it was 50 years ago.
At that time, when the cotton trade was at its zenith, as I said previously, I think it was probably the best-organised exporting industry that we or the world have ever seen. I was very familiar with it in the early 1920s when it was still very large. I remember that the merchants used to get their telegrams from all over the world in their offices as soon as they opened in the morning, and as soon as those telegrams were decoded the representatives from the mills in the different Lancashire towns would be coming in and seeing what we wished to buy. We then had some discussion with them as regards price and delivery and, of course, the type of cloth.
After lunch we went on 'change; they came back with their prices and we tried

to see whether we could do business with them. If we managed to secure the cloth, the acceptance was wired back that afternoon. If not, an alternative offer was sent back. All that business was done on a very slight profit indeed—some of it commission and some of it profit. But I think that has been the quickest and most efficient type of overseas business that the world has ever seen on a large scale.
The diminution of the industry has, of course, been steady, with spurts and occasional uprisings, in the last 40 or 50 years. Every new emergent country wishes to establish a cotton industry. It seems to offer them prestige, and very often they cannot run their mills efficiently without our technical help and without quotas and tariffs as well.
The reduction in the number of spindles in the last 10 years has been very substantial, largely helped by the redundancy scheme. In 1951 there were about 22 million spindles and last year I believe they were reduced to about one-third of that number. In the same way, in 1951, there were approximately 360,000 looms and those have now been reduced to about 130,000. When the redundancy scheme was imposed in 1959 it was done on the basis of a certain amount of cloth which was expected to come into this country at that time. It will be remembered that the Commonwealth cloth at that time was something like 360 million yards and foreign cloth 170 million yards. In 1961 320 million yards came from the Commonwealth and 420 million yards from foreign countries. In 1962 the figure was somewhat less because of bad trade in this country.
The scheme was based on the expected import figure of 1959, and the Government have done all too little to maintain the import figure at that level. They have let it gently rise and they have been all too slow in plugging the holes in the bucket. It is no use pouring redundancy scheme money or water into a bucket if there are holes in it, when the number and size of the holes are increasing and one does nothing to plug those holes. That is what has happened in this country. It is comparable to building a dam and finishing 80 per cent. of it while failing to do anything about the remaining 20 per cent. It brings down the whole scheme in failure and ruins the industry at the same time.
Quite a lot has been said about categories this evening. They are very important indeed. The Board of Trade has done all too little about these. Time and time again it has encouraged the industry to do what it can for itself, but that is not good enough in the present circumstances. The industry cannot handle that part of the negotiations nearly as well as the Board of Trade. The industry has insufficient facilities to do it. That is part of the job of the Board of Trade.
In the case of Hong Kong we see determined efforts to stop different parts of the industry. One year, Hong Kong manufacturers may send a large amount of children's clothing perhaps, putting several clothing factories in this country out of business. Then they will switch to something else, raising their price on the children's clothing and making a very big profit out of it. One by one, just as Hitler ruined and destroyed the small nations of the world, the Hong Kong industry destroys one type of manufacturer after another in this country. The Board of Trade has the facilities for stopping it, yet it is doing little or nothing about it.
I take a rather similar case, the export of handkerchiefs from India. In 1961, none were sent to this country. In 1962, 60,000 dozen were sent. In January this year, in one month alone, there were 26,000 dozen sent. The indications are that the Indians are concentrating on handkerchiefs just as Hong Kong concentrated on other things. One by one, the manufacturers in this country, quite apart from the spinners, the weavers and finishers, can be ruined in course of time.
As has been said, the United States has very full control over categories. We do not necessarily wish that amount of detailed control, but we wish for something reasonable to keep our manufacturers in normal business.
I have heard of two small rather silly cases which are, perhaps, an indication of hundreds of others. I am informed that on what are known as gents' denim trews up to 29-inch waist there is no tax imposed in this country. When the inside leg measurement is over 29 in., then a tax is imposed. But the Board of Trade insist on the turn-up being sewn up properly in this country, whereas on similar imported garments, I understand, the turn-up may be left loose so that it may

be turned down, lengthening the trews by the 2 or 3 in. of the turn-up. Someone is getting away with something there. I am told that the Board of Trade has been informed about it, but it seems all too slow to do anything.
Likewise, I am informed that on all made-up clothing such as men's shirts there has to be a marking,"Made in the Commonwealth" or something of that kind, in a fairly easily seen place. I am told that, recently, garments have come in with the mark almost hidden in the collar band so that it is very difficult to see it. Again, I understand that the Board of Trade has information about it but seems very slow to anything.
There is a great deal of trouble in finding out what cloth coming into this country is subsidised. The Cotton Board and other organisations have done much work on this subject but it is not nearly so easy for them as it is for the Board of Trade to find out about subsidies. I understand that Portuguese cotton yarn and cloth is considerably subsidised, but it has only been after a very long time that the industry has been able to obtain the information. I am told that the subsidy on carded yarn amounts to about 5·3d. per lb., on combed yarn 6·4d. per lb., and about 5¾d. per lb. on the weight of yam in cotton fabric. This sounds rather complicated, but I have no doubt that the experts at the Board of Trade know all about it.
Hon. Members have spoken this evening about cheap foreign cloth going to Eire, being manufactured, and then coming to this country with the necessary 25 per cent. uplift by which it obtains Commonwealth status. This is just not good enough. It is nothing but a wangle, and the Board of Trade should do something about it. We believe that 50 per cent. is reasonable uplift for this type of business.
Reference has been made—it is so important that I shall refer to it again briefly—to our heavy imports compared with those of other countries. We import about 35 per cent. of our consumption; in other words, for every two yards we make and use here we import one. In the United States, the percentage is about 5½. In France it is 1 per cent., in West Germany it is 7 per cent., and so on. We are the only country with a great textile industry which tolerates anything


of the sort. When our delegates go to conferences in Geneva, in France or in other places, delegates from other countries ridicule our people and ask what on earth our Government are doing not to preserve the wonderful industry which is traditionally so great here.
We have great skills, traditional skills. We have the towns. We have modern equipment. But we must have help from the Board of Trade to stop up the holes in the bucket and not allow cheap and often subsidised cloth to come here, especially from foreign countries.
The Board of Trade seems to sleep so much of the time. A country may be sending nothing to us one year, a little bit the next year, and thereafter increasing. Naturally, we grumble, but the Board of Trade says,"It is only a little bit. It does not matter", and it waits for about five years until it does matter, and then it settles for more than the greatest import from that particular country has ever been. This does not happen once. It is happening time and time again from all over the world. I tell the President of the Board of Trade that it is not good enough.
The President of the Board of Trade, his Ministers and his officials are charming people individually. They are very helpful. They work very hard. But collectively they are a very different"cup of tea". We want them to do things collectively, not just talk nicely as individuals. The other day, the President of the Board of Trade came to Manchester and he said sweet nothings. This is not good enough. We in Lancashire have had our troubles in the past. We have got our troubles now. I urge the President of the Board of Trade to take them seriously. Otherwise, we shall.

8.38 p.m.

Mr. Dan Jones: It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Middleton and Prestwich (Sir J. Barlow) because his criticism, at any rate, is always followed by action.
Although I have a lot of support and enthusiasm for the Motion, I am not entirely certain that I can congratulate the hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke). I say that because I have here a copy of the last debate on this very important subject, and it is

noticeable that on that occasion he did not support us in the Lobby. For that reason, I was rather disappointed that he should have attacked this side of the House which, as far as my memory serves me, has been consistently loyal to and anxious to help this industry, as it very richly deserves. I go out of my way to say that that criticism does not apply to the hon. Member for Middleton and Prestwich, and I accord to him my homage for what it is worth.
Coming to the industry itself, I think that these observations spring readily to mind, although very little can be said by anyone which has not been said already. I am very prepared to admit that there are people like my hon. Friend the Member for Farnworth (Mr. Thornton) who have been reared in the industry and who know its history chapter and verse. I must admit that I bring to this debate the feeling of injustice to an industry rather than an immaculate knowledge of it. Nevertheless—and I say this with some pride—I represent a constituency which, through the years, has made a quite remarkable contribution to this industry, and it could do so again. It has undoubtedly made a remarkable contribution to the economic well-being of our nation.
It is important to recall 1959 and not only the fact that millions of pounds of public money were poured into that industry, but that people in the industry did something which was quite remarkable. Indeed, with my knowledge of the industries of this country, I question very much whether any other industry would have acted similarly. At the behest of the Government, the industry went in for a period of rationalisation. It got rid of unwanted factory space, unwanted and out-of-date machinery, and unwanted men and women. I could not see the engineering industry in this country cooperating on such a basis. What this industry did was quite remarkable—and who can dispute it? This co-operation was given because of the specific promise of the Government that if what was suggested was done the whole industry could look forward to a period of greater prosperity than ever. The Government sent one of their Ministers, who is now in another place, to Lancashire to speak in precisely those terms.
I look at the subsequent developments with a sense of very real dismay. It is not a question of the Government not knowing what they are doing, so repeatedly have they been warned. I have never ascribed to the Government a lack of ability or the inability to see the economic problems just as clearly as we can. I must say almost with bitterness that it is nearly impossible not to come to the conclusion that the Government have written off this industry.
The people in my constituency looked forward to a new industrial era. Within a few months this new industrial child was suffocated by the Government and by the extent of importations. I shall not dwell on that matter except to say that I was particularly attracted by the reference of my hon. Friend the Member for Farnworth to Hong Kong, which will be the main burden of my very brief contribution. He said that Hong Kong might not be in the same position as Commonwealth countries in terms of tradition. I wonder whether my hon. Friend the Member for Farnworth knew how near to the mark he was. He certainly was correct when speaking about the financial well-being of that country.
I have with me a Barclays Bank statement which, under the heading"Present situation", states:
Business buoyant" and
No difficulty with payments for exports to Hong Kong.
In the middle of a fine analysis, the statement uses these words:
Textile manufacture, which accounts for about 50 per cent. by value of all exports, is the largest industry. Exports of garments increased last year by 18 million (33 per cent.), which more than offset a fall in exports of other textiles of £5 million.
I wonder whether those figures, carefully prepared by the bank, have, in turn, any effect upon our own country.
These figures will interest the House. In February, 1962, imports from Hong Kong of textile yarns, fabrics, made-up articles and related products were £899,567 and in February, 1963, one year later, the figure was £1,459,990. If my arithmetic is correct, that means that there was an increase in imports to this country from Hong Kong of precisely £560,423, which, judged by any standard, is a substantial increase upon a figure that already was very high.
The point I am making is that these exports do not represent trade with a typically Commonwealth country. I offer these figures as ample substantiation for that viewpoint. I refer the House to Hansard of 22nd May, 1962, when the former Secretary of State for the Colonies, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, was replying to Question No. 38. I quote:
Restrictions are necessary because there is a limit to the number of immigrants from mainland China that Hong Kong can now absorb, while there is virtually no limit to the number of Chinese who may seek entry. More than 1 million Chinese have entered Hong Kong in the past twelve years, and with a total population of 3·2 million, Hong Kong is very overcrowded. Nevertheless, about 60,000 still enter the Colony, legally or illegally, every year."—[Official Report, 22nd May, 1962; Vol. 660, c. 226.]
It is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that those figures, relating to the amount of imports into this country from Hong Kong, and to the number of people who find employment there from China, give us the right to say that the Lancashire cotton textile industry is actively subsiding the refugee problem from Soviet China. It is difficult, if not impossible, not to arrive at that conclusion. I suggest that these facts are similarly well known to Her Majesty's Government. If they are not, they ought to be.
There is a consequence. I, at least, am not prepared to accept the suggestion that this is traditional trade between Commonwealth countries. I reject that upon the evidence which I have put forward. Those three sources of information—Barclays Bank, the Statistical Division of the House of Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself—are sources of information which are incontestable and add up to a conclusion from which one cannot possibly escape. I repeat it. The Lancashire cotton textile industry is subsiding the refugee problem of Soviet China and Hong Kong.
There is a good deal more I should have liked to have said, but I know that other hon. Members are very anxious to speak, so, instead of making half a dozen more points I should like to make, I will make two and sit down.
First, I hope the situation with regard to Portugal will be very carefully watched. I am given very reliably to


understand that the industry itself believes that unless that happens Portugal could become the Hong Kong of Europe, because the exports of that country are very readily developing, and the costs of production in that country are comparable with those in Hong Kong, and consequentially offer a most unfair competition to the Lancashire textile industry. I would, therefore, repeat that I would hope that that situation will be very closely watched.
Secondly, and more importantly, I am very pleased indeed with the Motion which has been brought forward by the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Darwen—and full marks to him for so bringing it forward—and I hope that before the debate ends an equal amount of pleasure will be given us by the President of the Board of Trade in his response to the debate.

8.51 p.m.

Captain L. P. S. Orr: I hesitate to distract the House from the Lancashire cotton industry for a moment, but I do so with the justification that the Motion as drawn refers to the
disadvantages under which the United Kingdom textile industry at present labours".
So far as the textile industry in Northern Ireland is concerned, we fully share the anxieties of the Lancashire cotton industry about the high level of imports. We are entirely at one with Lancashire in this.
This is the first time I have sat through a cotton industry debate, and I have been impressed by the arguments, brought forward both by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke), in moving the Motion, and by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Blackburn), about the need for a better co-ordination of Commonwealth trading in textiles. I was impressed by the suggestion—I think it came from the hon. Gentleman the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde—that there should be a Commonwealth conference confined to textiles alone. I think there is clearly a need for the redefinition of Commonwealth products. The fact that so much in the way of imports comes by what my hon. and learned Friend called the Eire wangle through the back door is some-

thing which clearly the Commonwealth countries as a whole ought to consider.
Let me turn to the textile industry in Northern Ireland for just a minute or two. It is not, I think, realised in this House, because we hear so much about our shipbuilding industry and our aircraft industry, that the second largest employer of labour in Northern Ireland is the textile industry. Textiles as a whole account for 12½ per cent. of the working population, that is, 10,000 people more or less directly or indirectly employed. A very substantial portion of that textile industry is the handkerchief trade, and it is particularly to the disadvantages which that trade suffers that I want to refer. My hon. Friend the Member for Middleton and Prestwich (Sir J. Barlow) also referred to them.
Not only is it a substantial employer of labour; it is a very substantial exporter on behalf of this country. The value of exports of the handkerchiefs trade in 1959 was £507,000, in 1960 £553,000, in 1961 £507,000 and in 1962 £519,000. The whole of the export of made-up linen handkerchiefs from the United Kingdom comes from Northern Ireland, but what is not often realised is that nearly 85 per cent. of the export of cotton handkerchiefs comes from Northern Ireland. The majority of cotton handkerchiefs, even those which come from Lancashire, are hemstitched and made up in Northern Ireland and exported from Northern Ireland.
Until recently, we have been the third largest exporter of handkerchiefs in the world but because of the introduction of specialised machinery in other countries which can now be operated by means of relatively unskilled labour and because of the development of the other textile industries that we have been hearing about, we have now lost that position, and the handkerchief trade is in some difficulty. We have got to rely principally upon our quality in order to compete both in the home market and—it is important here to bear in mind what one of my hon. Friends said about the export of handkerchiefs from India—in the export trade.
It is extraordinary that in these circumstances there should be 10 per cent. Purchase Tax upon handkerchiefs. This


comes about because, with the withdrawal of the special surcharge on 10th April, 1962, the rate of Purchase Tax on Group 2 articles—accessories and minor articles of apparel—went up from 5½ per cent. to 10 per cent. This is, in fact, a direct tax on grey cloth, and its effect is to put a 1d. or 3d. on a finished handkerchief, depending on its quality. This has an extraordinarily damaging effect upon our handkerchief trade.

Mr. Douglas Jay: Surely what the hon. and gallant Gentleman is saying about handkerchiefs is also true of almost all other textiles?

Captain Orr: Yes, I fully accept that, but I am talking in particular about handkerchiefs. During the proceedings on the Finance Bill, some of my hon. Friends and I tabled an Amendment to deal with the problem, but, unfortunately, the Ways and Means Resolution meant that we were not in order when we tried to move a new Clause.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: But the hon. and gallant Gentleman will recall that there was an occasion when it was in order and when an Amendment was moved, from the Government side of the House—by, I think, the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Sir R. Cary)—to reduce or abolish the Purchase Tax on textile goods. It was most persuasively argued on both sides, and particularly on the Government side. As I pointed out on that occasion, hon. Gentlemen opposite could have had their way if they had only gone into the Division Lobby in support of their Amendment, but none of them would do so.

Captain Orr: The hon. Gentleman is talking about Purchase Tax on the whole range of textile goods. I was talking about a new Clause which I tabled to the Finance Bill to deal with linen handkerchiefs under 21 ins.—

Mr. Silverman: Surely the greater includes the lesser.

Captain Orr: Of course. If the greater is absolutely impossible, however, sometimes it is not a bad idea to go for the lesser. We had decided that the lesser was possible, and we thought it was reasonable to ask the Government to exempt handkerchiefs under 21 ins. We did that because the Chan-

cellor could not tell us,"But this includes headscarves and all kinds of things." What we tried to do was to move handkerchiefs into the category of toilet accessories. One of the unfortunate things facing the handkerchief trade is that paper handkerchiefs are free of Purchase Tax. It was this that concentrated our attention on this aspect. In the United States the paper handkerchief has now outstripped the textile handkerchief. Far more paper handkerchiefs are sold there now than textile handkerchiefs, and the textile handkerchief makers in Northern Ireland are very much afraid that this will be the pattern in this country in future.
Consequently we say that, in order to be fair as between paper handkerchiefs and textile handerchiefs, the time has come when at least this limited change in the Purchase Tax ought to be made to help us. I hope that my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade will say that he will recommend to the Chancellor that in his next round of Purchase Tax changes he will remove Purchase Tax from handerchiefs, bearing in mind the background of very considerable unemployment in Northern Ireland and the importance of this industry to us. We should take it very ill indeed if, in the next round of Purchase Tax changes, the Chancellor did not make this very simple concession to us. With that, I shall now allow the House to return to the subject of Lancashire.

9.2 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: I am sure that the hon. Member for Down, South (Captain Orr) will understand that I, a Yorkshireman representing a Lancashire constituency, am loath to follow him in the very interesting points that he has made about the effect of the Government's policy on Northern Ireland. I do so because I want to be brief. I think that it is most important that as many hon. Members as possible should be enabled to take part in the debate so that we can impress upon the Government what is almost the sense of desperation that pervades Lancashire at the present time.
I confess that my own self-imposed aim of brevity is made easier by the fact that, like other hon. Members who


have spoken, I find it difficult to say anything new on an occasion of this kind. Over the last seventeen years, year after year, there has been debate after debate on the cotton industry. The unions have pleaded, the employers have begged, the local authorities have argued, and the Cotton Board has wheedled in the most statesmanlike possible way. Yet throughout that period, particularly during the last twelve years, we have been met with indifference or invincible ignorance on the part of the President of the Board of Trade.
The President of the Board of Trade visited Lancashire very recently, and I should like to tell the House what the Textile Mercury, the principal periodical in the industry, had to say about that visit: speaking of the Minister, it said:
Eighteen months ago—just ten days before Christmas, 1961—he came to Manchester and failed to put anything at all, except comforting and meaningless words into Lancashire's stocking. Last week, at the start of the series of Wakes holidays, he came again, and if Lancashire was hoping for a few coppers for its holiday fund the county was again disappointed. As before, Mr. Erroll came, said the same old things, and went away. He might just as well have spent the weekend helping the Prime Minister cope with the domestic difficulties of the Government.
The Textile Mercury also said that the last time the President of the Board of Trade went to Manchester he said that he had gone there to listen and learn and that he had proved quite adequately that he had done neither. The net result of all the efforts that have been made by the industry and by hon. Members on both sides of the House over a very long period, manpower in the industry has continued to fall, imports into the country have continued to rise, and the confidence of the industry has been eroded.
I would like to say what this means in terms of a constituency. Excluding the town of Ramsbottom, the number of workers in this industry in my constituency fell between 1951 and 1961 from 7,923 to 6,300, a drop of one-fifth. The last annual report of the Lancashire and Mersey Industrial Development Association gave the unemployment figures for 11th March—and I strongly support my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Blackburn) in what he said about the unrepresentative and

inaccurate character of the unemployment statistics in areas like our own. The Association's figures showed that in Bacup alone there was an unemployment rate of 7·5 per cent. There were only two towns in the region, Up Holland, with 8·1 per cent. and Hoylake, with 7·6 per cent., which had a higher level.
The position in Bacup is accentuated by the fact that the slipper industry there is affected by similar conditions. The hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mrs. Castle), who also have the slipper industry in their constituencies, will, I am sure, agree.
The other day I got what I thought was one of the saddest letters I have had from my constituency. It came from a young and brilliant textile manager. I imagine that he is about 36 years of age. He wrote:
In my 20 years in the trade I do not remember such an atmosphere of widespread alarm and despondency. As an Associate of the textile Institute I would point out that an analysis of the admission lists shows that only about 5 per cent. of new members are connected directly with spinning and manufacturing. The supply of technical staff for future managerial posts is just about nonexistent.
That letter epitomises the tragedy of the industry. This is National Productivity Year, yet the new managerial and technical class in the industry is having its heart broken and being discouraged from continuing in the industry.
The hon. and learned Member for Darwen asked what Labour's plan was. It is not for me to say what it is in detail tonight, but I want to state, from my point of view, five things which are absolutely necessary. First, we need firm ceilings for total imports. I know that we are limited up to 1965, but I believe, as other hon. Gentlemen have suggested, that we should start now deciding what future figures are to be. It may well be that the 1959 ceilings were themselves too high, but I think that to start on the basis of the 1959 ceilings is to start on the wrong foot. It is for the Government to decide what size they want the cotton industry to be and then create the conditions to help it achieve and maintain that size.
Secondly, I agree with what other hon. Members have said about the need for categorisation. It is a horrible word, but


that is, I think, an essential requirement for the textile industry at present. The United States has over 60 categories, and I believe that a stipulation that exports to the United Kingdom should be limited according to well-defined categories should be introduced into quota restrictions against some countries and into bilateral agreements with others.
The third requirement. I believe, is, as the hon. and learned Gentleman has pointed out, to stop the carry-over of quotas. Here I would say that I wish that his Motion had not been in such general terms, but had included specific proposals for helping the industry out of its difficulty. That would have produced an interesting situation, in which hon. Members opposite whose seats in Lancashire are in great danger would have had an opportunity to save them by voting with us on the practical proposals which have emerged from both sides of the House today.
The fourth necessity, I am certain, is for the kind of cotton import commission which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition suggested in the Wilson plan five years ago—a commission which will regulate the flow of cotton imports and determine import prices. That is the only form of machinery which will stop the merchants who are at present sabotaging the Lancashire textile industry from continuing to destroy it for their own miserable private profits.
Lastly, I suggest that we must tighten up the anti-dumping machinery. I am sure that hon. Members who have stressed this point are absolutely right. It is ridiculous that it should be possible for Indian textile goods to come to this country at a price which is 20 per cent., 30 per cent. or more below the domestic prices that operate in India. It is ridiculous that yarn should come from Ireland and sell here at a price substantially less than that which it commands at home.
It is absurd that the industry should have to prove that dumping exists, that it is disrupting the industry and that it will be to the national interest to stop the dumping, before it is possible to get the President of the Board of Trade to act. The responsibility for acting must be accepted fairly and squarely by the right hon. Gentleman. I want him to tell us tonight what he objects to in the Canadian system; it seems to work well

in Canada. It protects the Canadian cotton industry. I hope that it will be possible for him to hold out a small crumb of hope that at last he is seized of the desperateness of the situation and is prepared to do something to help the people of Lancashire.

9.12 p.m.

Mr. Geoffrey Hirst: Time marches on. I have had to decimate the speech that I had prepared. I hope that my example will be followed; otherwise I shall feel that my sacrifice has been in vain.
This is an important subject, and I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) not only for his interesting speech but for leaving the Motion wide enough to allow other industries connected with textiles to be mentioned. I follow industry very widely, and I support the tenor of the speeches that have been made so far. I am only too conscious of the problems and difficulties facing the cotton industry. I am also aware of the fact that some people in the wool textile industry, considering the attitude adopted by the Government in respect of cotton, feel that some of the same dangers may arise in connection with their own industry.
On the other hand, for a number of reasons the wool textile industry does not have quite the same difficulties of competition in the home market that the cotton industry has to face. There are climatic reasons, and the expense and difficulty of working with wool products as opposed to cotton. Nevertheless, the wool textile industry is not very pleased with Her Majesty's Government. It is not as pleased as it used to be. The wool textile industry has a great export market worth £150 million a year. It is doing a fine job, but recently it has not always had the same attitude in respect of consolidation that it used to have.
This situation arises broadly from the Japanese attitude. The wool textile industry still stands by the fears expressed at considerable length on this subject in the debate in December, 1962. The protection provided to this industry in its own country is considerable. For instance, in the case of Italian cloth at 32s. a yard there is a particular form of duty, which is 20 per cent. ad valorem, plus 175 yen per square metre. This


means that the protection is double what it is in our country in respect of the same cloth. With cheaper material, at 14s. a yard, the protection is three times what it is here.
The Japanese market is almost exclusively controlled by large trading concerns, and a very nice arrangement it is. Most of the traders buy the raw material and then distribute it to mills of their own choice. Then, by a form of discipline, they put up the prices. All this leads to the greatest example of dual prices in the world. It still exists, and it will remain. It is nothing less than dumping. I support the views which have been expressed tonight that Her Majesty's Government are far too soft-bellied in this business. There is no reason why our basic industries and our sound export industries should be sacrificed, whatever the incentive may be to develop new ones.
Although I have had to scrap most of my speech, I wish to conclude by quoting an extract from the speech which was made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Association of British Chambers of Commerce. I should not have taken a lot of notice of it but for the context in which it was made. My right hon. Friend said:
It is fundamental far the British economy not to dwell too much on the lost trades of the past, but to concentrate more and more on the new trades of the future.
That is all right so far as it goes—if it were not Government policy time after time to say that everything must be thrown on the side of the new industry and that it does not matter how much an old one is damaged. That is not good enough for the textile industry and it ought not to be good enough for Her Majesty's Government to retain as a policy.

9.16 p.m.

Mr. H. Rhodes: Hon. Members must, of necessity, condense much of what they would like to say. If we on this side of the House were able to say all that we believed about the Government, it would take a long time.
I must excuse myself for being a little hoarse this evening. Yesterday, I was singing heartily at our annual"church

sing" in a church in the Pennines which overlooks Lancashire on the one side and Yorkshire on the other. I must confess to a few secular thoughts as we raised our voices in the hymn:
Let every creature rise and sing.
I thought of the multitude of people from both sides of the Pennines who have raised their voices about the parlous state of the textile industries and near-anarchy which persists.
The hon. and learned Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) asked a rhetorical question: what was the policy of the Labour Party? He should know by now that if it took as long to obtain an answer from the Labour Party as it has taken hon. Members on this side to get an answer from the Tory Party, or to find a policy at all, it would be a minimum period of twelve years. But he will find that it will not be long.
The hon. Member for Middleton and Prestwich (Sir J. Barlow) said that the Government were required to block up holes in the bucket. We do not want the Government to block up any holes in any bucket. We want them to"kick the bucket"—and to get out. The policies which they have pursued, laissez-faire as they have been, with a tiny mixture of planning, have led us into such a mess that now no one, either in Lancashire or Yorkshire, has any confidence in the Government.
The Government have relied on competition and consumer's choice and the elimination of the inefficient by the ready and old-established method of the bankruptcy court, never worrying about the side effects of that kind of approach. But, in recent months, they have accepted in part the principle, which has been enunciated from this side of the House for many years, that a planned economy is necessary. That must be the case, or they would never have dreamed of setting up the N.E.D.C.
When there is a violent change because of the contraction of an old industry or old industries, it is essential that there should be better and newer thinking than the President of the Board of Trade and his colleagues have shown up to now. I could quote at length what industry thinks about the performance of the Government, but I will content myself with making one quotation which will cap anything which has been said by


Tory Membrs about their own Government. This is from an important person in the wool trade:
Last week at the annual meeting of the A.B.C.C. the President made one of those London Schools of Economic speeches saying that Britain must get behind the glamour industries and forget old-fashioned ones. Mr. Reginald Maudling was there, nodding approval and grinning like a Cheshire cat. Our own exports, which regularly yield £150–£160 million in wool, waste, tops, yarns and piece goods, will not be maintained if H.M.G. continue in this way.
I agree.
The President of the Board of Trade has much to answer for. He was at the Board of Trade during the implementation of the policy of reorganisation and re-equipment of the industry under the 1959 Act. He has seen the response. He must be aware of the responsibility that he has to Lancashire and the whole country for the money spent under that Act. He has an account to render to the House as to why it has not been successful. On the one hand, there is assistance by the Board of Trade. On the other, the Board of Trade takes the benefit away.
Since the programme for re-equipment and reorganisation was devised, things have happened in Lancashire which, as usual, make the working folk bear the brunt of any change. I will give one example. During the last two years a large Lancashire firm with a reputation throughout the world for branded goods was broken up. A large financial organisation got hold of one-third of the shares, and on the 25 per cent. rule no major reorganisation could take place in the firm.
Therefore, the grip on the firm became stronger, with the result that a huge profit was made by that financial house. It did not do anything for the industry, but it threw hundreds of people on the scrap heap and broke up good mills in consequence. This is the sort of thing which has gone on concurrently with the Government proposals which have been supposed to help the cotton industry. The Government have undermined it themselves, and have allowed others to undermine it, too.
Now is the testing time. The country is watching to find out what is the Government's policy on redundant

labour. The redundancy caused by the contraction of an industry like this will be nothing to the redundancy which will be caused by automation in the future. I believe that the Government have neither the policy nor the will to do anything about it.
Of the wider question involved, the problem of automation and the economic and social changes which are bound up with it will loom long in the future. If this problem is superimposed on the existing unsolved problems which only common sense and planning can solve, our difficulties will increase to the point when no Government will be able to do anything about them. The answer to our economic problems lies in planning a holding operation for changing times to take account of older industries to allow for an orderly advance in world trade.
The immediate answer to this problem is to change the Government. Tory gimmicks are exhausted. I urge the party opposite to go to the country and discover what Yorkshire and Lancashire think about them.

9.26 p.m.

Mr. Maurice Macmillan: I will confine my speech to expressing general agreement with the views expressed by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke). I find it difficult to add anything constructive to his admirable speech.
I should like to develop what he said about selective protection, particularly with reference to the wool textile industry. I urge the Government to act now to prevent similar situations developing in this industry in the near future. Many practical steps have been suggested today which apply equally to the wool textile industry. Two of these have been, first, the speed of the machinery and the slowness with which the Board of Trade is taking up evidence of dumping and similar matters; and, secondly, the need to review the whole question of Commonwealth free entry, not only for textiles but in the context of their own actions in regard to British exports. I urge my right hon. Friend to look at the whole matter of developing industries in the light of the decision—with which almost every hon. Member who has spoken agrees—that a liberal trade policy is essential.
I think that most hon. Members would agree that, of necessity, the development of the backward countries—and I wish that we could have as general agreement on this as on other matters—should not be carried only on the backs of those industries which those countries find most easy to use, the textile trade in particular. Now that the problem is a little harder than it would have been if the Common Market negotiations had been successful, this in itself puts not a smaller but a bigger duty on the Board of Trade.
I hope that hon. Members who represent Lancashire will recognise that neither they nor anyone else should wish that the problems of the cotton textile industry should be solved at the expense of the wool textile industry.

9.29 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Holt: Because of the lack of time I will telescope my remarks into a few sentences.
The Government are to be congratulated on their desire to carry out a liberal import policy. They are not to be condemned for doing so. There comes a time, however, when one may decide to cry"Enough". The Government are to be condemned for allowing the burden of their liberal trade policy to fall unfairly and almost entirely on the cotton industry.
Up to a year ago it was possible to find people in the industry who still had confidence in its future. Since the failure of the Common Market negotiations there has been a noticeable change. I should find it quite impossible to take anyone into a mill in Bolton now where I would find any confidence at all in the future. As a result, some of the most extraordinary and hair-raising cures that I have ever heard have been suggested for the industry's troubles."An I.C.I. for the cotton industry"—I cannot imagine what that would do for the ultimate consumer, and it would certainly be a very bad thing for the industry itself.
We must therefore do what the Government have never been prepared to do, which is, within some limit, to decide that a certain portion of the home market shall be retained for the Lancashire industry. There can be many reasons for doing that. There can be many reasons for saying that the

industry should be left to wither away, but there are stronger arguments for saying that it is in the interests of the country, and of the consumers, to keep in being a small textile industry, as it is now.
I hope that we shall soon get into the European Common Market, but it is not in our interests that when we go into it we should not have a small but efficient cotton industry to play its part in that market which, for a long time, is bound to be a highly protected market for textiles. If that is to be done, we must fairly face up to the issue of how the Government can create a feeling of confidence within the industry.
I do not like the Labour Party's plan for an import board—that is far too bureaucratic, and quite unnecessary—but I believe that the Government should set up a committee to consider the basis on which this feeling can be created. [Laughter.] That committee should start with the objective of seeing that between 60 per cent. and 75 per cent. of the home trade is retained for the Lancashire industry. It should examine imports; those that Lancashire obviously cannot compete with should be allowed to continue, but those that are marginal represent the kind of business that should be retained for the industry.
I regret that I have had to telescope my remarks—obviously to the slight confusion of hon. Members—but I urge the Government to take that kind of action now because, without a return of confidence within the industry, the present deplorable state of affairs will continue.

9 33 p.m.

The President of the Board of Trade (Mr. F. J. Enroll): We are all very grateful to the hon. Member for Bolton, West (Mr. Holt) for providing us with our only laugh in a rather sombre evening. We realise that, as he had to telescope his remarks, what he said may not be a full and considered exposition of Liberal policy, but it was interesting to see the obviously clear intention that one should have free trade everywhere except in one's own constituency.
I very much appreciate the action of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen (Mr. Fletcher-Cooke) in selecting this subject for debate coming, as it


does, almost exactly a year after we last debated cotton policy. I had hoped that there would be an opportunity for such a debate before the House rose for the Summer Recess, so I particularly appreciate his action. The debate gives me an opportunity of saying how much the Government have been doing in the 12 months since our last debate, and in the 13 months since I made a statement to the House outlining the Government's policy in regard to imports of cotton textiles. I shall, therefore, go back to the situation as it was a year ago, and explain what has been done since then.
In my statement and subsequent speech in the Supply day debate I sought to give Lancashire certain assurances about out policy, with a view to enabling the industry to know where it stood in relation to imports up to the end of 1965. These assurances have beenfully carried out. If some hon. Members on both sides of the House have been somewhat critical about me during this debate I put it down to the fact that perhaps I have failed to explain sufficiently loudly and clearly during the year how much has been done. I hope to rectify that omission this evening.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen referred to my phrase about the ring fence a year ago. It is certainly quite a good ring fence. It was a phrase designed to illustrate what we were doing and I think that it has held up well. The hon. Member for Farnworth (Mr. Thornton), in a speech which we heard with great attention, with its combination of moderation and of feeling about an important subject on which he is a great expert, referred to uncontrolled imports. I assure the hon. Member that they are not uncontrolled. I will go into that in detail in a few moments.
The hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) spoke eloquently in the debate a year ago. I know that his constituency has been more hard hit than those of other hon. Members who have a constituency interest in the textile industry. He referred today to the need for firm ceilings for total imports. I mention these three points from the speeches because they serve to illustrate exactly what has been done during the last 12 months.
In my statement and in the debate last year I explained that India and Hong

Kong had agreed to continue the voluntary limitation up to the end of 1965 at the ceiling levels for piece goods and made-up goods which had been established in 1961. There was no question of increasing these ceilings. Indeed, an entirely new limitation was introduced in the form of a restriction on exports of cotton yarn for the three years at the 1961 level.
These arrangements are now fully operative although complete agreement was not reached with Pakistan. Pakistan, unfortunately, was not able to agree to restrain her exports of cotton yarn on the same basis as the other countries and therefore I decided to impose an import control—and this was the first time that this had been done in respect of a Commonwealth country—in December, 1962. I have recently been in touch with the Pakistan Minister for Commerce over the question of Pakistan's exports of cotton piece goods and made-ups, since his Government had also been unable to accept the three-year agreement. I am glad to tell hon. Members that the Pakistan Minister for Commerce has now assured me that the export licensing of Pakistan piece goods and made-ups to this country this year will be kept within the quota. I am glad to have had his co-operation because it has avoided the necessity for quota restrictions which certainly I would have imposed had the need arisen.
I also made it clear that imports from other low-cost sources which were subject to control—Japan, China, Formosa, and East European countries—would remain limited at the low quota levels which had been established. This has been done. Indeed, the restrictions have been intensified. The quota on imports from Formosa has been reduced from 12·5 million sq. yds. to 2·5 million sq. yds. per year. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen suggested that the quota had been exceeded. I should explain the exact position to show how these innocent mis-statements can arise.
What happened was that from last year, when the quota was 12·5 million sq. yards, there was a carry-over of 800,000 sq. yards. Total imports this year have been 3·5 million sq. yards, compared with a quota of 2·5 million sq. yards. The 800,000 sq. yards of excess is the legitimate carry-over. The


balance of 200,000 sq. yards arises from a very technical point of recording delays, that is to say goods imported last year which were only recorded in the January figures. Therefore, we have effectively cut back Formosa to the figure which we stated we would establish. As regards Japan, under the commercial treaty which was signed last November and which has been ratified in May of this year, a nil quota for yarn has been fixed and imports of cotton fabrics and garments remain subject to restriction.
Spain is a country which is frequently mentioned. The agreement between the industries limiting imports from Spain has been extended until the end of 1965. Last year I made it plain that imports from Western Europe and the United States of America would continue, subject to any change arising out of the Common Market negotiations, to receive tariff protection but that there was no justification for quota restrictions when dealing with our major trading partners whose standards of living are approximately the same as our own.
The industry has always told me that it was ready and willing to compete with countries of this kind, and therefore I do not think it is right for the hon. Member for Farnworth and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen to press so strongly for what they call global control. I think I am right in my recollection of what my hon. and learned Friend said—

Mr. Fletcher-Cooke: I think not. I went out of my way to say that I always told my friends in the cotton industry that they have got to take Portugal, that it is no good saying they must have protection from Portugal or a quota other than the normal E.F.T.A. standard, provided that there is no dodging or dumping. I have said that they have got to take Portugal as a Western European nation in the E.F.T.A. system.

Mr. Erroll: I am sorry if I did not correctly understand that part of my hon. and learned Friend's speech. Certainly reference was made to global control. The industry did not ask for global control which would include within the control the countries of Western Europe and the United States of America.

Many hon. Members have referred to countries with no traditional trade in cotton textiles. I said last year that they could not count on being able to build up a new market in Britain. I went on to reinforce that by saying that we would be able to keep the situation under much closer review than hitherto by introducing a new system of open individual licensing so that we would see exactly what was going on, and that we would also invoke the long-term Geneva arrangement wherever necessary and appropriate.
In addition to these steps, I have personally initiated negotiations with Malaya, Yugoslavia and the Irish Republic and have reached agreement with these countries for the limitation of their exports of the cotton goods which were causing or threatening disruption.
The case of Malaya is interesting, because one hon. Member said that Malaya was given a quota. This is quite the wrong way to look at it. Previously there was no restriction at all on Malaya's right to send cotton goods to this country; so that, in fact, we were imposing quite a severe restriction on Malaya's right to send goods to this country. It was very satisfactory that we were able to reach a voluntary agreement with her because thereby we did not imperil our export trade to Malaya.

Mr. Greenwood: What about a quota for Lancashire?

Mr. Erroll: I do not want to depart from the order of my speech but I must deal with that interjection. When the arrangements with Commonwealth countries come in for so much criticism we must remember that there are many preferential tariffs for the export of British textiles to Commonwealth countries; these were very much enjoyed by Lancashire, and regarded as very important, before the war but after the Ottawa agreements were negotiated. They are in the main, though not entirely, still in force if only Lancashire will do a bit more exporting. I very much wish that she would. [An Hon. Member:"Of what?"] Of textiles. There is a 15 per cent. preferential tariff on certain cotton goods going from this country to Canada as compared with corresponding


goods from Western Europe. It is a very valuable benefit which ought to be used. I wish there had been a little more said about Lancashire's ability to export cotton textiles to the markets which are still available and which are being used by other highly-developed countries.
The Yugoslavians have, in fact, behaved very well in this matter. I shall explain to the House a little of my problems in this connection. I went to Yugoslavia in September last year primarily to see whether we could win for Britain an extremely important steel contract worth about £25 million. This was a great prize to be secured for British industry, if it could be pulled off, but it did not deter me from taking up strongly with the Yugoslavian authorities the need for them to restrain their exports of textiles to this country, although they themselves were wondering how they could earn enough sterling to pay for the steel works and other equipment which they were buying from Britain.
I put this matter to them as strongly as I could even at the risk of losing the steelworks order. Fortunately, all came out well, because not only did we get the steelworks order, but we got from them an understanding that they would restrict their exports of grey cloth to us to 5·5 million square yards per annum for the three years 1963–65. Previously, of course, the level had been considerably higher. In 1962, it was about 7·2 million square yards and it was higher still in 1961. Thus, we have actually achieved a cut-back by voluntary agreement with Yugoslavia, at the risk, though fortunately not materialised, of losing a very important export order.
I hope that the House will appreciate that we sell a lot of the products of the British textile industry to Eire as well as importing there from. It is a trade in both directions. It varies between one element of the industry and another, but it is a very important part of our trade.
Discussions have been held with other Governments on a warning basis where the level of imports is too small to justify or to require restrictive action. I know that particular difficulty arises as a result of imports from Portugal. I was very grateful for the intervention

of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen on this particular matter. I appreciate that there is a problem here although I cannot quite agree with the somewhat exaggerated language of my hon. Friend the Member for Middleton and Prestwich (Sir J. Barlow). I have heard it said in Lancashire that Portugal could become the Hong Kong of Western Europe, but I do not think that this is likely to happen.
This is a difficult situation because of our undertakings under the Convention setting up the European Free Trade Association. Nevertheless, I took the matter up with the Minister of Commerce, Dr. Oliveira, in Lisbon this year, and, although there was the very great prize of the three-year acceleration towards zero tariffs on industrial goods to achieve in Lisbon in May, this did not deter me from pressing the matter with him. even at the risk which, fortunately, did not materialise, that the Portuguese would dig their heels in and not agree to the acceleration. I mention these things not—I hope that the House will appreciate this—in any boasting manner but to show that I have really placed the interests of the textile industry in the forefront of any negotiations with which I have been concerned, and I do not think that I have altogether failed.
As, I hope, the House will appreciate from the examples I have given, we must realise that the protection of Lancashire's industry cannot be the only consideration determining the policy of the Government. We are asked by hon. Members on both sides to increase trade within the Commonwealth, and we want to do so. On a serious occasion like this, I do not wish to make cracks, but the hon. Member for Rossendale is always for the free importation of Commonwealth workers into this country though he does not seem to believe that their products should come here.

Mr. Greenwood: That is not quite worthy of the right hon. Gentleman. One of the things characterising Lancashire's attitude throughout these extremely difficult years has been that we are fully prepared to play our part in accepting the products of the under-developed countries. We only wish that America and various countries of Western Europe were equally ready.

Mr. Enroll: I am coming now to the subject of imports by other countries. They have not done as well as us. I quite accept that. America has been restrictive, but I hope that the House will remember that America's unemployment problem is far worse than ours. With over 5 million unemployed, the United States is naturally very sensitive to any contraction of a labour-intensive industry such as the cotton textile industry. I am not here to defend America's policy—it can do that for itself—but the fact that the Administration have invoked the Geneva arrangement to such a wide extent is a matter for serious study and I have some doubt whether their action is in keeping not only with the spirit but also with the letter of the long-term arrangement.
I have been asked what I propose to do. We cannot compel other countries to relax their restrictions, but we can keep up the pressure on them. However, I am sure that it is not right to go about impressing them with the need to import more and to set an example of subjecting the under-developed countries of the Commonwealth to further restrictions in the British market. I am not suggesting that we need accept any more, but to cut back from our existing levels would have the effect throughout the world of encouraging other countries at present restrictively minded to become even more restrictive.

Mr. Jay: If the right hon. Gentleman thinks that the United States is in breach of an international agreement, presumably there is some way of making a protest, otherwise why do we keep to these agreements at all?

Mr. Erroll: It is not an agreement but a voluntary arrangement entered into by those who signed it at Geneva. I am keeping a very close watch on the position to see whether anything further should be done. But it might be more appropriate for those countries whose exports are being frustrated to take the initiative rather than we ourselves who are not directly affected.
May I move on because I want to try to deal with the many important points which have been raised this evening. I wish particularly to refer to categorisation, to use the jargon which has grown up. My hon. Friend the Member for Middleton and Prestwich said that when

I saw the Lancashire industry on 14th June in Manchester I said nothing. I should like to say in my own defence that a year ago I said that I hoped to maintain a series of regular meetings with the industry at which we could talk things over. The Cotton Board and myself had a very useful meeting some months ago at which we were able to talk things over in private. However, when I got to Manchester, I found that that was not what they wanted at all. It was quite a different affair. I was presented with a list of detailed points which I did my best to answer. I was then told that I had said nothing because I had not conceded any important point of principle and because on certain points it was quite clear that I could not give an immediate answer.
I am sorry that the industry has seen fit to resort to what I call an arm's length approach to me once again and I hope that the next meeting can be conducted on a more informal and more mutually fruitful basis.

Sir J. Barlow: Must we suppose, then, that every time my right hon. Friend comes to Manchester he will say very little and that no appreciable advance will be made towards doing something for the industry?

Mr. Erroll: The question is whether one ought to go to Manchester, because it is drummed up into a full-dress occasion, with the Textile Action Group on the wings and the Press and everything there, which is not the best way to have fruitful discussions. I feel it only right that I should make that point in my own defence.

Mr. Charles Mapp: rose—

Mr. Erroll: Hon. Members can choose between making speeches during my half hour or listening to what I have to say, but they cannot have both in the last four minutes.
On categorisation, the fundamental point is that the Commonwealth countries naturally attach importance to their ability to make the full use of their quota on goods for which there is a market. An unduly rigid system would reduce their earnings by limiting their opportunities to sell their textiles when market conditions change. But there is another side


of the picture, and that is that if one had excessive categorisation it would lead to great administrative difficulties.
The industry in this country claims however, that categorisation would help the exporting country. Therefore, if that is so, clearly the best way is for the British industry to negotiate and to talk matters over with the exporting countries—[Interruption.]—which is what I have suggested. But I have also said that I will be very happy to help in this important matter and will be glad to do so when the industry knows exactly what it feels is negotiable as a result of talks in this matter.
I remind the House that the present arrangements are part of an agreement to which there are two parties, the other side as well as ourselves, and, therefore, changes can be brought about only by the agreement of both parties. It is important that we should remember the other parties to these various agreements.

Mr. D. Jones: I wonder whether the Minister—

Mr. Erroll: I am sorry, I cannot give way; I have several things to say. That is why we have encouraged the Cotton Board to enter into discussions with India and Hong Kong. The Board has sent the Indian industry a detailed account of the categories of grey cloth which it has in mind and has suggested limits on the export of finished cloth and made-up goods.
The carry over of quotas, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bury and Radcliffe (Mr. Bidgood) and the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Blackburn) referred, can be seriously exaggerated. There is, indeed, an advantage in having a carry-over facility, because in the event of an absolute cut-off we would only compel shipments to try to come in within the quota year. The original concept of the carry-over was to ensure that shipments came in regularly instead of being bunched up towards the end of the year. The carry-over does not really affect the trade from Hong Kong, because it fills its quota fairly well every year. It has hardly affected trade from Pakistan. It is a serious matter this year only in the case of India, and the Indian industry has agreed informally with the British industry to limit the carry-over this year to three months in-

stead of six months. The way things are shaping, it looks as though there will not be any carry-forward from India into 1964.
Therefore, it is questionable whether the carry-over is a serious issue. Here again, however, I will be very glad to do what I can to help the industry. I would hope for fruitful and useful talks with the industry about this, in Manchester or in London—but I hope that they would be informal—at any time that the industry wishes.
There is not time for me to deal with the important question of imports through the Irish Republic, to which several hon. Members have referred. The matter was discussed in Manchester, but here again I should be prepared to have discussions with the industry if it wished. I discussed anti-dumping extensively with the industry in Manchester. I have offered to give all the help I can from my officials within the framework of the present legislation.
On re-equipment, we have a good story to tell. No less than £5¼ million has already been paid out for re-equipment grants. Approximately a further £2 million is in the pipeline and this takes no account of expenditure which does not attract grants. The grant is 25 per cent. of the total expenditure. This means that £21 million of re-equipment has already taken place and there is approximately another £2 million in grants. That makes up the total of about £28 million of re-equipment already, with another year to run, but we do not know the exact amount until claims for repayment are submitted. It is, therefore, a great mistake to say that re-equipment is not going well.
From what I have said, I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Darwen, who moved the Motion, will realise that I am determined to help the industry in every way possible and to remove the disadvantages as soon as possible within the framework of the present policy of limiting Commonwealth and other imports, as I have outlined, at their present level.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House recognises the disadvantages under which the United Kingdom textile industry at present labours, as compared with


conditions enjoyed by textile industries in other countries of the world, and urges Her Majesty's Government to take all steps within its power to remove those disadvantages as soon as possible.

BOVINE TUBERCULOSIS

Tuberculosis (Extension of Payments Period) Order 1963 [draft laid before the House 23rd April], approved.—[Mr. Scott-Hopkins.]

Tuberculosis (Extension of Payments Period) (Scotland) Order 1963 [draft laid before the House 9th April], approved.—[Mr. Brooman-White.]

FERTILISERS

Fertilisers (United Kingdom) (Amendment) Scheme 1963 [draft laid before the House 30th May], approved.—[Mr. Scott-Hopkins.]

BRITISH ARMY (PRIVATE DRINKWATER)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. M. Hamilton.]

10.1 p.m.

Mr. Frank Allaun: On the morning in Whit week when I read in the newspaper of the resignation of Mr. Profumo I determined that I would approach the new War Minister as soon as he was appointed and ask him to reopen the whole of the Drink water case.
I had been bitterly disappointed by the harsh action of the previous Secretary of State for War. He wrote me on 16th January this year refusing to reduce the sentence on Private Drink water by a single day. In the letter he said that there would be a review of the case every six months, account would be taken of good behaviour by the prisoner, and a reduction of sentence could be recommended. He wrote me again on 21st February saying that the first of these reviews had been held and there was no change in the sentence.
Mr. Profumo had only to say one word and either Drinkwater would have been released immediately, or he would have had his sentence reduced. I am appealing to the new Secretary of State for War

for a more merciful attitude, hoping that he will at least reduce the sentence at the August review, or, better still, release him forthwith.
The last letter I had from Walter Drinkwater was from Preston Gaol, where he is at the moment, haying been transferred there from Wormwood Scrubs. It is dated 23rd May, He writes:
The problem causing me a lot of anxiety is this review on 6th August. For various reasons it has just got to be a success. My record up to date is as good as it will ever be. I do know the one from Wormwood Scrubs is 100 per cent. This was proved by the fact that I was allowed to work on the prison officers' quarters outside the prison. As yet I have to prove to the authorities here just how far I am to be trusted. Needless to say I intend doing just that.
As we meet here, Private Drinkwater has been lying in gaol for 17 months, serving a three-year sentence for his part in a fracas in the N.A.A.F.I. which did not justify, in my opinion, more than 28 days' C.B., and I intend to show that that is the case.
What kind of a man is Walter Vincent Drinkwater? I have been to see him twice in Wormwood Scrubs and I must say I am deeply impressed with his character. Aged 22, he was orphaned during the last war and brought up in a Roman Catholic orphanage and by his aunt and uncle who have a business in Salford and who are devoted to him. Private Drinkwater was a good soldier, with a first-class record. He enlisted and served three years as a Regular with the Lancashire Regiment in Hong Kong. He went back into civilian life, and after eight months decided to return to the Army as a Regular, deliberately choosing his old regiment where he had been happy. In fact, it was a happy regiment. But by that time the regiment had been transferred to Hilden. There was a new commanding officer, and the atmosphere had completely changed. Despite this, Drinkwater was about to be made a corporal when the incident occurred.
I have read the letters from this strikingly handsome young man to his uncle and aunt and also to his fiancée, and from these letters, too, it is quite apparent that he is a man of fine character. This is confirmed in a letter from his platoon commander, Lieutenant T. C. W. Proffitt, writing to his uncle


and aunt on 30th March, 1962, after the court-martial had ended. Lieutenant Proffitt writes:
Your nephew was extremely well behaved during the trial, and after the trial was over I talked to him. He is not depressed, and I am sure that when this unfortunate episode is over he will do extremely well in civilian life. He is an intelligent man, well mannered and a natural leader, and I am sure he will succeed. I also told him that if he ever wants references in order to get a job I will willingly give him them.
I saw the letters, too, from Drinkwater to his young lady after the sentence, telling her not to wait for him, but I am very happy to say that she has waited for him. She has stood by him. His uncle and aunt have a good home waiting for him on his release and until he is married, and, in addition, a good job.
The charges under which Private Drinkwater was sentenced are serious ones. One was hitting a sergeant, and the other was incitement to mutiny with violence. What really took place was a completely unpremeditated fracas between men and a sergeant, all of whom had been drinking, in which some purple language, worthy of the Establishment Club, was used. I admit that. It was, in fact, merely a four-letter brawl.
Brigadier H. McL. Morrison, his defence counsel at the court-martial, wrote to me to say:
I was shocked to find this boy charged with inciting a mutiny. The charge was obviously absurd. But the sentence was so out of proportion to the offence that it completely staggered me. This was the worst case of man mismanagement I have known in 32 years' Army Service.
It appeared to him as nothing more than a drunken escapade.
That there was no premeditation is clear from the way in which the brawl started. Brigadier Morrison says:
The facts out of which the charge of incitement to mutiny arose were these. On the afternoon of Sunday, 28th January, 1962, a group of men were sitting in the unit canteen drinking and celebrating the birthday of one of their number. The appellant, the Private Drinkwater, was a member of this party, and had, on many previous Sunday afternoons, used the canteen in this way and never been previously disturbed. They were behaving quite well. On this particular day the Orderly Sergeant, Sergeant Pollard, came in and ordered the party to leave. When asked why they had to leave, Sergeant Pollard said it was a battalion order. The evidence shows that no such order ever existed, and that Sergeant Pollard, to put it mildly, was aggressive. (It has come

to my knowledge, since the trial, and I am in no doubt as to the accuracy of my information, that the Orderly Sergeant had himself been drinking.) The way in which these men were handled and the fact that they had been drinking undoubtedly affected them in such a way that they were likely to say and do things they would not say or do in normal circumstances.
It is clear from the evidence of Sergeant Pollard himself, who was a witness for the prosecution, that even after ordering them out of the canteen he still did not leave the men alone, but provoked them further. Pollard states:
I spent about thirty minutes trying to persuade them to leave and the accused, together with four others, then went into the snooker room. I then ordered them to leave the snooker room. Then they went to the Supper room. I followed them in and told them they had to leave the premises.
This was confirmed by Drinkwater in a letter which he wrote to his uncle and aunt:
My pals and myself were having a nice quiet party on Sunday afternoon, 28th January. Well, we were sat, minding our own business, when in walks the sergeant and tells us to get out of the bar. So we walked out of the bar into the N.A.A.F.I. canteen, which we are allowed to do. Anyway, sergeant 'Know all' tried to make us get out of the N.A.A.F.I. and we were not having it. So he starts picking on one of the mates. Well, the two of them end up having a 'scrap'. Well, another pal separated them. O.K. that was fair enough. So the sergeant grabs hold of me. I told him to get his hands off me. He wouldn't so I pulled away".
While Private Drinkwater admits hitting Sergeant Pollard, he claims that he and others had been treated with violence, that the incident was provoked, and that the sergeant had been drinking. The sergeant kicked Drinkwater before he hit back.
I would remind the Under-Secretary that there have been, during the previous three months, no fewer than four courts-martial at Hilden Camp and six more men were awaiting court-martial at the end of March. The men were in an irritable mood because of the bad food, bad living conditions and bad treatment. He will recall that there was considerable attention drawn about this time to the conditions in B.A.O.R. The language Drinkwater used was strong, to put it mildly, if one studies the transcript, but I would refer to the Army Act Section 43, note 2,d, which reads:
More abusive and violent language used by a drunken man, as the result of being taken


into custody, should not be used as ground for framing a charge of using threatening or insubordinate language to a superior officer.
How much less should it have been used for framing the very serious charges in this case?
Coming nearer the present time, I am sure that the Minister will recall the affair at Pirbright, when 25 guardsmen walked out of camp. Let us contrast the sentences. Four of these guardsmen were sentenced to 14 days' detention, three to 10 days' detention and the other 17 received sentences of up to eight days' restriction of privileges. Yet Drink-water is serving three years.
I put it to the House that this is a monstrous sentence for this kind of affair. This was not mutiny in the sense that mutiny is generally understood. If the Minister replies that the two cases, the Pirbright and the Drinkwater affair, are different, I agree that they are. The difference, however, lies in the fact that there was not the slightest element of premeditation about the Drinkwater case and, therefore, it should be treated less—not more—seriously. Nor was this a brawl involving German civilians or German soldiers which might have caused bad relations in that country.
Drinkwater's appeal against this absurdly high sentence has never been heard, although he made three attempts to have an appeal. Incidentally, I would like to point out that he did not receive the final refusal of his leave to appeal until he had served nine months of his sentence, and this, I suggest, is very similar to the more recent case of an officer, wrongly imprisoned, who served his sentence completely before his appeal was allowed. It will be remembered that on that occasion Mr. Profumo conceded that there should be a change in the procedure in these matters.
I conclude by saying that I fervently hope that tonight the Under-Secretary of State will give me good news, if not of an immediate decision then at least an indication that clemency will be shown at this review on 6th August.

10.16 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for War (Mr. James Ramsden): Before I answer the case put by the hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun), I had

perhaps better say a general word about my position in the light of what I understand from the terms of his earlier Motion and also from what he has said tonight, he is asking me to do. I think that he really wishes me to say that I am in a position to be able to do something to recommend Drinkwater's early release. What I could do, if I were to agree with him and accept this argument, is to cause a review of the case to be undertaken by the Army Council and, in so doing, if I agreed with him, I could make a recommendation in favour of his release. However, I must say that I do not agree with the hon. Member's view of this case and do not intend to cause it to be reviewed, and I shall try to explain my reasons why. There is one further point I should make about the present position.
Drinkwater is now in prison, having served 15 months out of a total of three years. If he gets maximum remission—and for this purpose he is on the same footing as civilian prisoners—he can be discharged on 29th March, 1964, having done two years out of the three. In addition, besides his eligibility for normal remission in this way, his sentence is due for reconsideration by the reconsidering authority every six months.
The next reconsideration is in August. When that happens, any representations that have been made, or that may be made on his behalf, will be drawn to the attention of the reconsidering authority, including what the hon. Member has said tonight. I think that the hon. Member quoted from a letter that I certainly have not seen and, if he wishes, this can be drawn to the attention of the reconsidering authority as well.
I want to make it clear—it is only fair that I should say this—that what I say tonight in reply to the hon. Member is not to be taken as in any sense prejudging the outcome of the reconsideration. I know that the reconsidering authority will not so take what I have to say. The hon. Member has made quite a point about the opinion expressed by the defending officer that this conviction and punishment were wrong, and it is true that defence counsel expressed the opinion during the trial that there had been bad man management and subsequently repeated this view more fully in a letter to the hon. Member, which I have seen.
It should be emphasised that, in expressing this view, the officer was giving his private opinion, that of a brigadier who retired from the Army in 1946. Clearly, it deserves to be taken into account, and so it has been. But against it there must also be taken into account the opinions of the court which awarded this sentence, of the confirming officer, without whom it could not have been operative, of the Army Council which dismissed the appeal petition, and of the Courts-Martial Appeal Court.
Thus, on the other side there is a considerable weight of opinion—not only military opinion based on military experience at least equal to that of the defending brigadier but also that of a civilian judge. The hon. Member said that the appeal had never been heard. I fail to understand that, in view of the various stages of the consideration of this appeal which I have just mentioned.

Mr. Frank Allaun: The man's plea for his appeal to be heard was rejected three times. I cannot see the Minister's point.

Mr. Ramsden: I now follow the hon. Member. I thought that he had been saying that the appeal had not been considered. It was fully considered but, on consideration, it was rejected, as he said.
I have done my best to view this case dispassionately, and, I hope, sympathetically, and have tried to get clear in my own mind the real grounds for the uneasiness of the hon. Member and the accused's defence counsel about the sentence.

Mr, Charles A. Howell: Is it the appeal that was turned down three times, or leave to appeal?

Mr. Ramsden: It was leave to appeal—but it was an application for leave to appeal, supported by a statement of the case and considered on the basis of a review of the case.

Mr. Howell: There has never been an appeal.

Mr. Ramsden: The hon. Member is splitting hairs over this. Leave to appeal has been refused.

As I was saying, I have tried to consider the case dispassionately, and to get clear in my own mind the grounds for the uneasiness of the hon. Member and the accused's counsel. I believe that what really worries them is that they feel that the wrong interpretation was put upon these events from the very beginning. In his letter the defence counsel said:
I have had the good fortune to serve with some tough units…and I feel sure that in any one of these what happened would have been treated as a drunken escapade and nothing more.
In an article that I have seen in the journal Today the hon. Member took much the same line as he did tonight.
If we approach the case from this point of view—that is, that things got off on the wrong foot from the start—the crux of the matter must surely be the original decision that a charge of incitement to mutiny involving violence—which was the main charge—should be preferred against Drinkwater. The charge having ever been preferred at all, once that charge had been preferred and proved and the court had convicted the accused of it there was bound to be a pretty heavy sentence, because this is a very serious military crime, and the penalties provided for it are as extreme as any under the Act.
Therefore, what the hon. Member is really saying—and I am meeting him on this basis because we cannot have the trial here again tonight—is that when the decision to prefer this charge was taken it was wrongly taken, in the light of a mistaken view of the whole character of this incident. It may help if I give the background to this decision, which was one for the commanding officer.
When a commanding officer decides that a soldier should be brought to trial by court-martial he will normally obtain legal advice from the Army Legal Services on the summary of evidence, but although the Army Legal Services prepare the draft charge sheet it is open to the commanding officer, after discussion with the Army Legal Services, to recommend to the convening officer that the accused be brought to trial on charges less serious than those drafted by the Army Legal Services, provided that such a course does not appear contrary to the evidence.
When a commanding officer takes such a decision there are certain things that he will have to bear in mind. There is the state of discipline in his unit, and the question whether it is necessary to make an example. That is something that only he can judge. He will think of the character and the record of the accused himself. The borderline between serious indiscipline and mutiny as defined in the Army Act is a very narrow one, and it must have been the view of the commanding officer in this case that the accused had stepped over the dividing line and that an incident that started as a brawl had degenerated into a mutiny. This view was certainly confirmed by the court.
The hon. Member must not suppose that it is an easy thing for a commanding officer to send a man for court-martial on a charge like this. It is a thing which has serious implications, not only for the man but for the unit, and it would not have been done had not the commanding officer considered that it was his clear duty to do so. And, of course, his decision was upheld in the event by the outcome of the trial.
Regarding discipline, I would say to the hon. Member that unquestioning response to discipline, that is to orders given by superiors in rank, is probably the most important single factor in determining the effectiveness of the Army or indeed of any other of the righting Services. I would also say to the hon. Member that it is very difficult for anyone to appreciate the significance of this who has not himself been with troops under fire or at any rate, under the stress of active service. That is true of most civilians, and it may even, in peace time, be true of some soldiers. But it is understood in the Services for the very good reason that failure to preserve discipline leads to the unnecessary loss of men's lives. It is a basic fact of Service life and the reason why, with the authority of Parliament, we have a special code of military law, and why those who are guilty of severe breaches of it must expect to be severely punished.
Regarding Drinkwater's character and his previous record, from the reading of these proceedings one may get a fairly good impression of the kind of soldier that he was. His platoon com-

mander wrote to his family about him—the hon. Gentleman has quoted from the letter—principally, it seems to me, because the man had been trying to mend his ways under this officer, and, as he said after his trial, Drinkwater was sorry that he had let his platoon commander down. The fact remains that he had been court-martialled only a few months previously on two charges of striking a superior officer, so I think that it can hardly be argued that he was a particularly good soldier from the point of view of discipline.
The hon. Member said that Drinkwater was about to be made a corporal. It is true that his platoon commander said that he intended to recommend Drinkwater for promotion. But it did not lie with the platoon commander to promote Drinkwater. All that he could have done was recommend Drinkwater to his company commander as suitable for promotion.
The hon. Member rehearsed at some length the events which took place and which were the subject of evidence in this case. I do not intend myself to enlarge on them. But I must make one or two comments upon some of the omissions of the hon. Member. He stopped short in his account when the affair got as far as the canteen. He did not go on to say—this is evidence which was mainly in support of the charge of incitement to mutiny—what happened in the cookhouse, and what happened on the veranda, and the words that were spoken—they were shouted to a crowd of waiting soldiers by the accused—in recognition of which the charge of incitement to mutiny with violence was upheld.
The hon. Gentleman said that clearly the actions of the accused in this case were not premeditated. But I must point out to him that premeditation is not an essential ingredient in a charge of incitement to mutiny. It is as true under military law as I believe it to be under civilian law that a person must be presumed to intend the consequences of what he does. The fact was that words, clearly held by the court to constitute incitement, were uttered by the accused in the hearing of a crowd of soldiers. I should have thought that the consequence of that needed no emphasis upon its possible gravity.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the conduct of the orderly sergeant. This may or may not be in dispute. The fact is that the order issued by the orderly sergeant was a lawful order and as such should have been obeyed by the accused. The hon. Gentleman made a comparison, which I do not think is warrantable, between the situation here and the circumstances of the recent occurrence at Pirbright. In answer to Questions in the House I have said before that I think the circumstances are completely different and that the events at Pirbright were in quite a different category. There was no violence in question there, there was no question of resistance to arrest and though, as I say, there is a narrow

borderline in these cases between serious indiscipline and mutiny, in the case at Pirbright I do not believe that was over stepped.
I have tried to answer the points raised by the hon. Member. I am sorry I cannot do as he asks, but I think that this was a bad case and, whatever the hon. Member may say of Drinkwater as a man, as a soldier he did very wrong.

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at twenty-nine minutes to Eleven o'clock